


Jackal

by bazmahtaz



Series: The Jackal [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Animalistic, Bloodlust, Brutal Murder, Established Relationship, F/M, Flashbacks, Heavy Angst, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Multi, Murder Kink, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rough Sex, Sequel, Serial Killers, Smut, Super Soldier Serum, Threesome - F/M/M, Torture, Transformation, Violent Sex, Weapon X Project
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-02-07 07:52:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 39,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18616363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bazmahtaz/pseuds/bazmahtaz
Summary: Four months after the events of Chiaroscuro, Steve and Edith are tracking Bucky with little success. When Edith begins to notice bizarre changes in her own body, she begins to suspect that her interrogation in the basement of the Triskellion wasn't just an interrogation, and decides to track down those responsible.This work contains graphic violence, torture, and the aftermath of medical experimentation on a woman already dealing with severe PTSD. Mind your triggers, please.





	1. Jumping the Wire

**Author's Note:**

> I'm already 8 chapters into this, minus editing, and wanted to have it done and published before endgame. 
> 
> Alas, we will have to assume that any wibbly wobbly timey wimey things that will inevitably happen in Endgame are in some alternate universe completely disparate from this one (not that they wouldn't already be... but still)
> 
> I don't own Marvel. My bank account has .53 cents in it if you need proof.

August 8th, 2011

 

The shock is what kept her awake, she thinks, the twenty or so hours she doesn't remember between stepping on the mine and waking up without a leg is explained to her by Castle, who had been on the mission with her and Hayes. She remembers a feeling, like missing a stair in the dark, and then the sensation of whirling forward in slow motion before she's just… missing time. 

She was conscious for most of it, apparently, and smart enough to immediately reach for her med kit and tourniquet her torn apart leg before Castle radioed base. He didn't dare lift her off the ground, but sat behind her so she could lean against him while they waited for the bomb squad and medical to show up and get her to surgery.  She had been calm, and even coherent, until they anesthetized her, or so she's told. Something about that scares her even more than the blackout.

She wakes up with the leg gone from above the knee, and with a new roadmap of burns and scars that wrap up around her hip and branch across her other calf like a river delta, etched into her skin in peach pink and mottled black and blue.

She's sent home, of course. Her military career over two months shy of her getting promoted to Captain.

With physical therapy and a plastic prosthetic her body learns how to move again.

Her brain takes longer.  
  


* * *

January, 2015

 

The first time it happens she's in Dublin. 

They've hit a dead end in their search, and Steve and Sam decide to ring in her birthday (which she had honest to Christ forgotten about) in an Irish pub. And normally she would stick to a two drink limit, but Irish whiskey is kind of a big deal, and when in Rome…

She fully expects to be drunk, warns the guys that they're going to have to carry her passed-out ass back to their motel but within a few hours of nonstop drinking she's about as drunk as Steve.

Which is to say,  _ not _ .

She blames it on the fact that she's working out more these days, so she's probably just metabolizing the alcohol differently than after her Grandad died and she had spent her days living off fast food and Kentucky bourbon while sleeping all day. Healthy coping mechanisms aside, she had been able to get drunk or high so fast it was embarrassing. 

The second time it happens is a bit weirder.

They're in Amsterdam and she's waiting for Natasha to meet her in a crowded disco with some information she's scrounged up for them. Edith is at the bar, nursing a jack and coke, and ignoring the advances of some idiot with a popped collar who keeps trying to buy her drinks and get her to dance. She threatens to break his fingers if he touches her again, and he stops, but not before he manages to slip something into her drink.

She doesn't even notice because she's too busy trying to keep her eyes peeled for Natasha, but when the spy arrives and points out the cloudy evidence of rohypnol in the booze that Edith  _ just _ took a gulp off she realises exactly what's happened. 

She feels a harsh rush of indignant rage, and uses what she assumes is her limited window of consciousness to knee the guy in the balls with the adamantium prosthetic and, promise kept, breaks all his fingers on both hands. It's so satisfying she wishes she had done it slower.

Natasha tucks her into the backseat of her car, calling for Steve to meet them, but by the time he arrives thirty minutes later, Edith is still perfectly fine, if maybe still coming down from her anger. 

The third time is an experiment.

They're in Cozumel, after getting a lead on Rumlow, who they've taken up hunting down whenever Bucky's trail goes cold (which is frustratingly often) and Edith, who has not once been able to handle more than a single shot of tequila, buys a bottle of hundred-fifty proof Sierra Silver and chugs it.

She doesn't even get the hiccups.

When Steve finds her that night she's fuming, but refuses to tell him more than she's angry about something that isn't him but can't talk about it without getting things straight in her head first. He doesn't understand, but gives her the space she needs to do pushups and jumping jacks until she's exhausted.

She calls Natasha and lays out her suspicions the next day.

* * *

  
  


February, 2015

 

His name is Doctor Theodore Caine and he's basically a Bond villain. 

The file Natasha finds for her shows that he's responsible for the science behind what she was injected with back at the Triskelion. He's also, conveniently, still alive and working on other experiments with various poisons under a certain Weapon Plus program. Everything else on the doctor is wrapped up in red tape and the entire thing absolutely reeks of Hydra's influence. 

So of course, she has to tell Steve everything. He's more pissed off than she is, and nearly paces a hole in the floor until she forces him to follow her to the gym. They both need to take their anger out on something that isn't their new hardwood floors. 

She needs the practice if she's going to go after Caine anyway. She hasn't really gotten an idea of just how sturdy her metal-infused bones are, or really put the new leg through its paces. Steve's kept her on rooftops and in birds nests with a fancy sniper rifle and a com buoy strapped to her ass, but she doesn't plan on taking out Caine from a distance. She needs information first, and then she wants to make him take a bath with a toaster.

Steve wants to take it easy on her, keeps pulling his punches and forcing her on the defensive until she whirls on him with a kick that sweeps his legs out from under him and backhands him hard enough that, serum or no, she  _ knows _ it hurts.

“Okay.” He says, and rams his shoulder into her middle to bring her down to the mat with him. It winds her, but not enough that she can't take the opportunity to lock his head under her arm and wrap both legs around his waist. It forces him into a painful bow and to either stop breathing or roll over, flipping their positions and giving her room to switch her grip from his neck to his arms, grappling him in place. His legs are strong enough to roll them forward though, and this time when he wrestles her onto the mat she can spot the heat behind his eyes that sends an answering spike of something primal through her.

She bites at his lip, a kiss that's as much a fight as anything else they've been doing, and twists her hips in a way that gets him under her again, digging her elbow into the front of his shoulder and growling at him when he grabs at her ass hard enough to bruise. He bites her tongue, pushing back with his own and bucking his hips against her where she can feel the thick line of him through their sweat pants. Her nails digging into his bicep while she bares down on her elbow until he grunts in pain and yanks her arm away, bringing her flush against him and wrapping the arm around her like a vice. 

She scrapes her teeth against his jaw, bites the lobe of his ear, and then moans when he yanks her head to the side and closes his own teeth against her neck, the hand on her ass moving so he can kick her pants down and pull her firmly against his hips. He's so hard she can feel it pushing out over his waistband, and it takes her no effort to wriggle his pants down and slide over him with a hungry noise that makes him squeeze her harder.

“Are we fighting or fucking?” She growls, and he rolls them and flips her onto her stomach, pressing her shoulders down  with one hand and gripping her hip with the other.

“Your mouth is filthy, Edie.” He slides his cock between her thighs, rubbing against where he knows she wants him, heavy and hot, and holding her still while she tries to regain control. “It shouldn't turn me on, y'know. I don't like cursing.”

“You gonna make me shut up, Rogers? You're cock is on the wrong end for th-fuck!” He slams into her, and she feels the deep throb of mixed pain and pleasure as he stretches her wide, filling her like a missing piece. His hand fists in her hair and he groans filthily as he starts to pound into her at a bruising pace. She repeats the curse, and he hauls her up by the hair, her back against his chest, and shoves his fingers into her mouth to keep it occupied while he fills her from behind. 

She can feel her heart beating between her legs, her muscles clenching around him as the rest of her tenses and she forgets how to breathe, a singularity of pleasure coiling through her until she gasps around his fingers and rides out the waves of bliss until he responds in kind, biting into the meat of her shoulder and spending himself inside her with a hoarse moan. 

They both collapse, gasping, and still tangled together. Edith revelling in the heat of his body behind her and the lull of his breath against the nape of her neck as he curls around her. Her brain is fuzzy static for the moment, warm and soft and satisfied. 

Steve touches her bruises and makes a concerned noise in the back of his throat, and she huffs a laugh against his bicep. “I swear to Christ if you apologize for giving me the best orgasm of my life I will feed you to Fury's cat.”

“You promise I didn't hurt you?” He nuzzles into her neck, kissing gently in a way that makes her shiver. 

“Some of us like it a little rough, gorgeous.” She smiles, and he continues kissing her until she arches her back and sighs. “Gives me something to remember you by when you go off Avenging.”

“You're such a sentimentalist.”

“Says the man with the Andrews Sisters ringtone.” She laughs “We should head back up to the apartment before we scar someone for life with round two.”

“If you stopped being such a distraction we wouldn't have this problem, y'know?” He grumbles without any heat. “With your nasty vocabulary.”

“You like my nasty vocabulary.”

He nips her ear lightly getting up, righting his sweatpants, “Exactly my point, Sweetheart.”


	2. Zero Dark Thirty

 

October 18th, 2010

 

Time has a funny way of becoming a physical weight when she's bored. When she was in basic training it would creep into her bones and settle until the urge to move made her muscles cramp. She would wiggle her toes in her boots in an attempt to delay the need to move anything else.

They train you to watch. To make yourself invisible in the woods while you're laying belly down and waiting for something, anything, to happen. But this war was being fought in sand, and on cracked concrete roads, and she could tell you now that the woods, with it's ambient noise and easy camouflage was easy mode.

Nothing here but the hiss of sand over more sand whenever the wind kicked up, and the tarp she had taken cover under occasionally fluttering around the edges. The fear that had kept her alert had ebbed the day before yesterday, and now, pure boredom was starting to creep in.

She felt guilty, at first. She was sharing her foxhole with the corpse of a man she had loved like a brother. Samuel Ramsay had been in bootcamp with her, in the same regiment on her first tour, and then in Special Forces on their second and third. They had made Lieutenant together and shared the party afterwards at a pub in Brooklyn. 

Sammy was dead now. Taken by a shot that had passed clean through him that had turned into a sucking wound despite her best efforts to staunch the bleeding and save him. She had taken his dog tags already, and buried him in the hot, dry, sand in an attempt to preserve his body for his family back home: two younger siblings and an aging mother who would want his ashes to be buried next to his father. 

That had been six days ago. 

Another day, and the canteens would be empty, despite her careful rationing. Two mouthfuls at noon, and two mouthfuls as she woke up. 

Another day after that and she would start to die of dehydration. She had been told that was unpleasant, and had decided to shoot herself if she started hallucinating. 

She almost reached for the pistol when the men with wings flew overhead.

* * *

  
  


February, 2015

 

Caine, is as easy to track as an injured deer. Still running a lab outside of Dallas under an alias, his MO has always been research in toxicology and evolution. If the funding being sent to his bank account through an untraceable business holding Is anything to go by, he's even still in contact with Hydra.

His schedule never changes, and she knows that he'll be the last person at the lab on the Tuesday night she chooses for her purpose. Steve and Sam are there to keep a lookout while she spoofs the security system and slips through the rooftop access. Sam keeps patrolling the exterior while Steve follows her inside. 

The entire building has four security guards, but they don't have access to the labs themselves, only the hallways between them. Their schedule is erratic, patrols seeming to only happen whenever the guards feel like it, which isn't as often as they should. She still has to knock one out with a syringe full of clonazepam and move him to sit at a desk just incase his relief comes looking for him come radio check. 

Steve moves quietly for a guy his size, dipping into rooms and clearing them ahead of her so she can focus on where they're going. The toxicology labs are left and down from where they ingressed, at least on paper, but Sam's scan of the building had shown a large power draw from the basement directly below.

Her suspicions are confirmed when they reach the lab and find it dark and unoccupied, Sam hasn't reported Caine leaving the building, so she knows the Doctor's still onsite.

She signals Steve to keep watch while she slips into the lab, walking the perimeter and looking for-

That's a secret bookshelf door.

She takes a moment to nerd out, and then looks over the disused physical media arrayed across the shelving unit until she spots the only one without a layer of dust. Never let it be said that Edith Crow didn't read her classics; the door clocks open and she's able to swing it open to reveal an elevator. She grins under her mask and taps her com to give Steve the all clear.

“Elementary, my dear Rogers.”

“Geek.” He whispers when he sees her good work, and she bumps her shoulder against his when she steps inside the metal box, closing the bookshelf behind them. 

The doctor is, apparently, not expecting Captain America to step out of his super secret elevator, and the moment of confusion is all it takes for Edith to hit him with a dart that drops him to the floor, unconscious. 

“We're on Caine.” She says to Sam, and he double taps to confirm. 

Steve steps further into the lab, looking around and taking his bearings. He's looking for direct links to Hydra, while she preps the Doctor to just hand them over.

He had been... tentative. Edith knew she needed information from the doctor that they likely wouldn't find on his computer, and she knew how to extract information from the unwilling.

Steve had done some terrible shit in the war. He didn't talk about it often, but he'd woken up often enough with a haunted look that Edith knew by rote. She'd worn it often enough herself and had enough redacted debrief files that she was pretty sure he could see it in her too.

The main difference is where Steve saw purpose she saw justice. The two philosophies weren't incompatible, but they sometimes formed an uneasy coalition in the Rogers and Crow household.

She sits Caine in one of the lab's chairs, handcuffs his arms to the armrests and uses a length of rope to column-tie his legs together and his shoulders back. She ties another loose column around his throat, testing the slipknot to make sure it puts pressure where she wants it. 

Steve looks over her work, an eyebrow raised. And she mutes her com briefly so that Sam can't hear when she says “I'll teach you how to do that to me when we're not so busy.”

God he's pretty when he blushes. Steve bites his lip and stares at the ceiling for a moment and she laughs, quietly.

“If you two are playing hide the zucchini down there I swear to God.” Sam's voice grumbles and she laughs again.

“Tenfour, Falcon.” Steve sighs and Edith takes a moment to look around the lab.

The walls are a thick concrete, likely soundproof, and the two ends of the lab are separated by a thick pane of scratched up glass she would bet good money is bulletproof. There's a huge, metal capsule of some kind, laying flat on a gurney inside the enclosed space. The rest of the lab has a bevy of computers and medical supplies, a biochemistry suite, and a hospital bed with thick, metal restraints. They may as well have graffitied “Hydra Was Here” on the wall.

She passes a thumbdrive to Steve and instructs him to plug it into the nearest computer, the one Caine had been working on. She tells him to take everything, and he balks until she tells him to just click the option that says “duplicate server” when it pops up. 

She forgets how old he is sometimes.

She shouldn't. She showed him how to shop for clothes online just last week.

She pulls Caine's chair over to the middle of the room, and another chair in front of it.

“You might want to step out for this.” She tells Steve. And it's more for her benefit than his, she thinks. She stops being Edith during an interrogation, puts up a wall between herself and the nightmare she presents to the people she's questioning. Her humanity gets shoved behind that wall, sometimes, if she needs it to be, and she's not sure Steve would still love her if he knew what she was really capable of.

“I've done this before.” He says, and she shakes her head. 

“Not my way you haven't.” But he doesn't move from his place behind the doctor and she sighs. “Keep as quiet as possible, and stay out of his line of sight… and don't stop me.”

He nods and she takes another walk around the room, collecting a few things and placing them on a surgical cart next to her chair with the syringe full of epinephrine she has ready to wake him up. She flicks the lights off, and the only thing keeping the room from pitch darkness is the glow of the computer monitor.

She takes a deep breath, letting herself fall into that blank state where her brain stops feeling things, and won't shy away from what she needs to do. Steve's presence seems to fade into the background, a non-issue, and she injects the doctor before sitting back down, and waiting.

* * *

  
  


Steve watches her prepare with a kind of morbid curiosity, but it's not until she sits down across from the Doctor that he realizes why she gave him an out.

The armor itself is intimidating. Tony had built it to her specifications after she had started going on missions with them, and he had never understood the heavy shoulders and thick chest plate until now. It makes her look androgynous, threatening in a way she would never be in the kind of skin tight tactical suits he and Natasha wear on missions. The charcoal gray colour makes her blend with the shadows that press in around her, where she has deliberately placed herself, the blue glow of the computer glinting off the goggles she slides into place in a final barrier between them.

The doctor jerks awake, and tries to take in his surroundings for a moment before his eyes fall on her. She doesn't react, just stays completely still and silent while he settles.

“Who sent you?”

“I sent me.” It's not Edith's voice, it's colder, harder. He thinks she may have modulated it somehow at first but when she speaks it lacks the robotic quality most modulators have. “I'm here to talk to you about an experiment you ran nine months ago at the Triskelion.” 

Caine is quiet for a long moment, Steve can't see his face, but can tell he's weighing his options based on the set of his shoulders and the tilt of his head.

“The interrogation, you mean.”

“No, Doctor Caine.” She says, still unmoving, like a marble statue in a gallery, “The experiment.” 

The doctor breathes through his nose then, a resigned sound. “We knew she didn't tell us everything when we questioned her. If we had known she had been treated with the Wraith serum we never would have tried to use my toxins on her.” 

It takes Steve a moment to realize what he's talking about. The word Wraith tickling something in the back of his head until he remembers one of his first missions after New York, when they had been chasing down leads for gas attacks that killed people within seconds of exposure. But he's saying that Edith had been dosed with the stuff somehow?

“Keep talking, doctor”

“They will kill me if I do.”

“I will hurt you if you don't.” And Steve knows she means it. 

The doctor seems to test his restraints then, struggling, and Steve realizes that she's pulling on the rope she's tied in a ladder around his neck. He hadn't even seen her move.

She relents after a minute, and the Doctor coughs for another as he wheezes for breath. 

“When I was in training, I learned something that I think you, as a medical professional, might find interesting.”  She says in that steel-cold tone. “Oxygen deprivation makes the human body much more sensitive. Changes the upper and lower limits of our pleasure and pain threshold.” there's a quiet rattle of metal as she selects an item from the cart, inspecting it for a moment before returning to her seat. “Doctor, I will get what I want out of you one way…” she flips the scalpel in her hand for emphasis “or another.”

Caine heaves a breath, swallows around the knots that aren't quite cutting off his air supply anymore.

“The Wraith Project was far more advanced than we had been told, but they had gone silent. Pierce suspected they were plotting to secede from Hydra, but it had turned out the Jackal had taken them out and stolen their version of the healing serum. We didn't suspect her to receive the serum herself, but she was injured and someone on the inside decided she was worth saving, even if she would be a cripple after. Such a waste.”  

If the insult bothers her, she doesn't show it. Just continues to sit as still as a stone.

“The Wraith serum allows for a resistance to most disease in the long term, and helps tissue repair and cell regeneration over the short term, but it also encourages the Meta gene to express itself in human subjects. My toxins were designed to put the human body under enough stress to trigger it's full potential.” He actually seems excited at this idea, and keeps talking despite his earlier concern. “It should have just been a clever method of getting the information we wanted out of that sad, crippled girl, but instead she has somehow survived long enough to show up in my lab and badger me for a history lesson.”

She reaches up and pulls away the mask, placing it to the side. Her eyes are hard, her mouth an impassive line. She doesn't even look like Edith in this moment. There's no warmth in this face, not a single twitch of emotion beneath the barrier she's constructed here.

“If you know who I am, then you know what I do to my targets.” She says, voice unchanged. 

“Yes. And what you look like when you're begging for me to stop.” 

Steve goes to take a step forward, to crack Caine across the skull but one of her hands raises and he stops. He promised her he wouldn't interfere, but the urge to hurt this man is strong enough to pull at his restraint. She doesn't even look at him before her hand returns to its place on the arm of the chair.

“How many did you experiment on.” She says, ignoring Caine's taunt. 

“Five that lived long enough to show results.” He says. “Toxicological immunity, Resistance to pharmaceutical medications, and then increased aggression until they became nothing but a vicious animal that needed to be put down.” he jerks his chin toward the glass chamber “You want an example? Open the stasis pod.” 

Her eyes don't leave the Doctor's face for at least a minute. She sits in silence, calculating something in her head that Steve can't fathom, and then stands and brushes past him to the terminal in front of the glass wall. A few quick taps against the surface and the metal capsule within hisses as a thick white mist escapes from vents on either side. 

The person, the  _ animal _ , that emerges when the lid pops open like a casket, is lanky, thin as bones with stringy, dark, hair and skin that's covered in bruises and mottled with bloodstains. It has the Y shaped scarring of a recent surgery, like an autopsy, spanning their chest in puckered fits and starts that shine pink and silver against the darkness of it's blue-black bruising.

It's eyes-

Her eyes, because this creature had been a woman at some point, are a piercing amber with pupils like pinpricks and bloodshot sclera. Her mouth hangs open, dripping bloody saliva, panting, and when she notices Edith at the window, she lunges, teeth gnashing as her nails scrape over the glass and she lets out a sound like a feral dog that echoes off the walls and sends pure terror skittering down Steve's spine.

Edith's face is still, blank, featureless, but for the tightening of her jaw. Her hand wraps around the butt of her pistol as she hits another series of commands into the terminal and then approaches the door.

The gunshot is deafening, the woman hitting the ground a foot away from Edith, arms outstretched with her fingers hooked into grasping claws. 

“How long?”

“Most succumb within a year.” Steve can hear the grin in the man's voice, “Time is running out, Jackal.”

“It is, Doctor.” She agrees. 

Steve watches as she returns to stand in front of him, and pulls the rope around his neck in such a way that the entire column of knots on either side of the doctor's throat slide to meet in the center. He thrashes under his restraints, twitching until he loses consciousness. It's cruel, and slow, and as much as Steve wants this man to suffer he feels like this is something much colder than the rage he feels knowing how much Caine and his people have cost Edith. 

Edith, who is dying because of the monsters he failed to eradicate in the forties, who he'll lose by inches like he's losing Peggy. 

Steve wishes he was the one with his hand on the rope, and the thought scares him.

She checks for a pulse when she's done, and then unties the doctor and lays his corpse out on the floor, crossing his arms over his chest with a scalpel in one and and an empty syringe in the other; the tools of his crime. It's like images he's seen of Egyptian mummies, buried with the things they used in life, judged worthy or unworthy by a God with the head of a jackal.

Steve knows a calling card when he sees one.

She's quiet for a long moment, looking at her work. Her face is still blank, unreadable, distant.

“Edie I-” he begins, but she shakes her head minutely.

“Not yet.” She says, and he knows she means several things all at once


	3. AWOL

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did someone order some angst?

**3 AWOL**

 

__ October 13th, 2010  
  


_ Jack, _

_ I know you like your snail mail, and your internet ain't shit in Montana so here. You get to read my chicken scratch. _

_ I heard from Mouth that you're lookin’ to move to NYC with the rest of us city slickers. Hit me up if you're in Hell's Kitchen and want to grab a beer. We can get the boys together and make trouble for the locals. It'll be me, Mouth, and Russo, and I know Hayes was planning on making a trip up from Nashville in the fall. We'd be missing a few of us, and some of the better ones, but I know all of us miss your ass.  _

_ They assigned me and Russo to some ballbusting project I can't talk about. Mouth got his dishonorable discharge l _ _ ike you said he would and is working out of some hole in the wall as a merc. Tate n’ Hayes finally took their blue ticket and gave the forces the finger.  _

_ Maria and the kids are good. She's pushing me for another one but I think two is enough. If we do, I think I'd name the kid Ramsay, or is that too millennial bullshit? He'd hate it wouldn't he? _

_ You seeing anyone yet? I know you and Mouth had a thing. How the fuck did that ever happen? Did you need to sit on his face to shut him up?  _

_ Never mind I don't wanna know.  _

_ Hit me up when you get the chance. I'm still in Kandahar, and it doesn't look like they'll move us for a while. _

_ Semper Fi _

_ Frank _

_ Ps: Maria says you need to come for a real dinner because she wants to meet your crazy ass. She called you my “War Mama”. I think we need to change your callsign now. _

* * *

 

November 1st, 2010

 

_ Frank, _

_ I'm still hobbling around like a fucking pirate, and none of you lead-footed idiots are going to be pushing me around New York City in a goddamn wheelchair. I love you all, but not enough for that level of stupid. Give me a couple months to get better at having a peg leg and I'll get back to you. _

_ Dinner Is cool. Tell Maria and the kids I say “Hello” and that I'm looking forward to seeing them.  _

_ I'm not dating. I'm definitely not dating Mouth. It wasn't “a thing”. I shut him up with Hayes socks in his face.  _

_ Not everyone is cut out for relationships. _

_ Not surprised everyone else got out. Feels like we lost a lot of our heart once Ramsay was gone. We weren't the same stone-cold pack of weirdos without him.  _

_ I'll see you in the fall. _

_ Edith “Jackal” Crow _

_ Ps: If you name that kid Ramsay he will spin in his grave. You need to name it Jack, obviously _ . 

 

* * *

 

February, 2015   
  


She's quiet all the way back to New York, with a thousand yard stare that even Sam doesn't try to talk her out of. Her face is schooled into a blank nothingness that seems colder than the ice Steve came out of, and twice as deep.

So when they get home, and she looks around like she doesn't remember where she is, he can only take her in his arms, pulling her to his chest. Her armor is a solid wall between them, so he slides his fingers into her hair and another to the flexible kevlar over her hip. He kisses the crown of her head, and after a moment she brings her arms up, wrapping them around his waist and pressing her face against his chest. 

“I love you.” She says, and he can hear the tremor in her voice. “Fuck, I love you.”

“I love you too.” He says into her hair. “Let's get you cleaned up, huh?”

She makes a noise to the affirmative, but doesn't move. Steve feels her shaking, rattling in his arms quietly. He knows she's crying now, and he thinks that's good, but not getting her any closer to the tub and bed. They've both been awake for far longer than they should, but he knows he won't feel nearly as exhausted as she does until far later, so he moves her arms to his shoulders and lifts her knees around his waist, walking her into the bedroom himself.

He removes her armor, pulling latches until it falls away and she's left in the kevlar onesie that covers everything the hardsuit doesn't. And he peels that off her just as easily. Her underwear follows, and he tosses everything into the laundry before picking her up again and carrying her into the bathroom.

Her gaze is focused on the water where it laps against her mismatched calves, curled forward in a way that tucks her entire body into the smallest space she can manage. He can see her eyes, red rimmed and shiny, tears clinging to black lashes, but the rest of her face is pressed against her knees.

Steve pulls off his gloves, and strips off the top of his uniform, wetting his hands in the bathwater before grabbing the bottle of shower gel she keeps in the corner and spreading some on his fingers. He moves her hair so it falls away from her back, and then strokes his hand over her shoulder blades and down her spine with slow, methodical, movements until her eyes close and she exhales a little deeper. 

He washes her arms, and her legs, kneading the soles of her feet and the palms of her hands until her fingers and toes uncurl, cups warm water in his hands and lets it rinse away the soap and sweat and hurt. 

“I don't know how to process any of this.” She laughs, or sobs, or something in between. “I'm sorry.”

“You shouldn't be apologizing, Edie.” He runs fingers through her hair, bringing her to rest against him at the edge of the tub. “I shouldn't have ever involved you in this. I should have dealt with Bucky on my own.” 

“Then you would be dead and I would still be fucking my liver in Harlem.” She takes his hand in her own, and cranes her neck to look him in the eyes. “Even with all the awful shit we've dealt with together, I wouldn't change it.” 

She kisses him, and it tastes like salt and iron. Desperate, he thinks, and knows that he can't let her go any more than she can spare him whatever grief they both know is coming. Its messy, and their teeth clack together in their desperation to taste one another, to sear this into their memories like a brand. 

He carries her to bed, pulls off the rest of his clothes without leaving her mouth for more than the moment it takes to pull his shirt over his head. They cling to each other, chest to chest, like he can somehow take her into his body and protect her there, beneath his ribcage. Her hands grip against his back, nails leaving pinpricks of heat and pain where she grabs him too hard. He wants her to leave marks on his skin, wants to mark hers too. He wants physical reminders of what they have to outlast his grief.

“Please-” she says against his mouth, and he fills her, sinking into her heat and shuddering in pleasure and pain and want. “I love you, Steve.” She whispers into his ear and he closes his lips around her pulse just to feel it beat. 

He thinks of Edith smiling at him on their first date, of how her fingers are always stained with paint and how she can't go eight hours without a cup of coffee, about how she quit smoking and chewed up every pen in the house. He thinks about how she feels in his arms, alive and warm and beautiful. 

He thinks of Bucky, about the end of the line, about trips to Coney Island and overfull dance halls and drawing Bucky's face when he wasn't paying attention. He thinks of the train, the fall, and the grief that feels just the same as this.

He can't fail them both. He can't fail either of them.   
  


* * *

She fakes sleep until Steve's own breath slows, until she's positive he won't wake up when she leaves his arms and moves silently to across the hall the the room she never sleeps in anymore. Her go bag sits in her closet, and she slips into a pair of jeans and a plain tee-shirt before throwing it over her shoulder and moving to her laptop.

“Jarvis?” She says in a low voice.

“Yes, Lieutenant?”

“I need you to transfer everything we pulled from Doctor Caine's office today, and everything you can find on the Weapon Plus program and put it on my phone.” She pauses, listening for Steve's even breathing across the hall, and adds “And anything on Super Soldier experiments and Meta Gene research.”

“Will that be all, Lieutenant?” 

She presses her mouth into a line. “Can you take my phone off the Avenger’s tracking parameters when you're done? Or is that too much to ask?”

The AI pauses, and if she didn't know any better she might think Jarvis was nervous. “I can, Lieutenant, but may I ask why?”

She exhales through her nose, runs a hand through her messy hair, “I'm not letting Steve follow me just so he can watch me go crazy and die.” She says, “I'm gonna do some very bad things to some very bad people, and I don't know if he can handle it.”

“I see.” Jarvis says, “I will take you off the grid once the upload has finished, ma'am.”

“Thank you, Jarvis. Take care of everyone okay?”

“Of course, ma'am.”

She walks back across the hall, looking at Steve's silhouetted back from the doorway, light bright enough that she can make out the pink lines she carved into his shoulders that had been bleeding only an hour before. Edith types a brief message that doesn't say half of what she wish she could and sends it as a text, then, in a fit of sentiment she's powerless to fight, she slips on one of his hoodies from the laundry. 

It smells like him; warm cedar and clean aftershave. She knows it won't last, but she'll take what comfort she can in his scent while it still wraps around her. 

“I love you.” She whispers into the dark, and then turns away before she can't anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments feed the fic machine.


	4. Friendly Fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a lot of feelings about Endgame that I may or may not cover in a separate fic later down the line. 
> 
> No spoilers until that day comes. 
> 
> Anyway here's wonderwall.

March, 2012

 

She hasn't been this distracted by a man since she was a teenager. 

In her defense, he is  _ incredibly _ attractive; Tall, broad shouldered, and dirty blonde on fair skin. His eyes are blue as a clear sky and when he looks over at her and catches her eye in her still life class she swoons a little. 

Gross.

It's worse when she discovers that he's fucking  _ nice _ to boot. How is she supposed to flirt again? The last dude she flirted with was as fucked up as she was at the time and had basically had a neon sign above his head saying he was up for some no strings attached sex in the backseat of the squad's humvee.

She's too old for that kind of bullshit now. She wants to be romanced like the semi-stable adult she is. Just because her apartment says “bachelor” on the lease doesn't mean she wants to act like one.

When her blue-eyed stranger asks her about her work she ends up stumbling over herself like an idiot to talk to him, even passing him a flyer for her opening night at Station where he will no doubt take one look at the hot mess of acrylic and pain she's put on her canvases and realize she's not worth it.

Who wants to date a one-legged vet working three jobs to make ends meet anyway? She's getting her hopes up over nothing. Over a stupid little crush on a man so gorgeous he should be modeling underwear for Calvin Goddamn Klein. If the leg didn't scare him off already, her angsty art will. Five minutes, she thinks, and the guy will be running for the hills.

She's not sure what to do when he doesn't.

* * *

  
  


February, 2015

 

Jarvis was kind enough to organize the information downloaded to her phone by relevance, using some algorithm that makes her head spin, and she's quickly able to ascertain that the last American lead she had hoped to investigate was already shot by some vigilante mercenary in a red suit, so she has no choice but to follow up with the next one. A scientist operating out of Sokovia by the name of Strucker who was nigh untraceable except for a thirty-year-old journal submission on new wave eugenics. 

She makes a face. People like that deserve what they'll get from her. 

The flight is twelve hours with a two hour stop in London, and she has to force herself to spend those two hours studying the contents of her phone instead of reminiscing on those first few dates with Steve, texting and exchanging photos. She still has the one of him on the London Eye, the sun turning his skin golden and picking out the flecks of red in his hair. It makes her heart twist inside her to look at it.

When she touches down in Sokovia, she immediately crashes in a nearby bed and breakfast, paying in cash and leaving a fake ID before sleeping off her jetlag, showering until her skin prunes, and eating her weight in waffles provided by the silver-haired grandmother running the place. Edith doesn't speak much Russian, but she's able to thank her hostess before she leaves.

Gun laws are fairly lax in Sokovia, so she's able to acquire an M9 without any trouble, and a Bor sniper rifle that makes her miss Tony a little bit. For all that he was an arrogant jackass, the man knew how to build a gun, and the rifle he had given her was beautiful, reliable, and could shoot a BMG through a concrete wall and hit any target the built in bioscan could pick up on the other side of that wall. She had named it “Bianca” and made Steve jealous with how much she kissed that sniper rifle.

Knives are cheap, easy to find, and easy for her to conceal all over her person, and she's able to wrangle together a kevlar vest and face shield from an army wholesaler just outside the city. After that, she's armed to the teeth and ready to move on her target.

Strucker, from what she can tell, has no home address, and no paper trail in the city, but the locals tell her about a research compound taking volunteers for medical experiments just north of it, and that might as well be a billboard telling her what's happening in there. 

From her truck stop motel room she's able to use a cheap laptop to access blueprints of the place, which is a  _ fucking castle _ by the by, and start planning her ingress. She's going to have to stake out the place from somewhere nearby to get a sense of how many people are even in the building, or guarding it. 

It's a long, long, two days.

Edith hunkers down on a nearby hilltop with a pair of binoculars and a bird watching book as an alibi, and manages to find a space between two watchtowers in the middle of the woods where she has a view of the southeast side of the compound, with eyes on the main door. The place is crawling with security, jeeps driving in and out, guards in full body armor patrolling every inch of the outside. Every time she thinks she's found a pattern it changes, every time she sees a way to get inside the compound it ends up becoming untenable. Forget Bianca, she'd need a bunker buster for this shitshow.

She moves to the other side of the castle on the following day, and that's when shit hits the fan. 

The woods are fairly dense, but the patrols know their way around better than she does, so when she's in the middle of dodging one coming up from her left flank, she completely misses the one coming around behind her. 

They immediately start yelling at her in Russian, and she points to her book and holds up her binoculars, apologizing in English and doing a passable job at seeming surprised that she's run into anybody. The guards aren't the least bit forgiving, though, and aren't lowering their pistols from where they're pointed at her torso. She's deeply regretting her inability to speak any language that isn't English or passable Arabic when she sees the cloth bag and handcuffs they plan on putting her in and realizes she's gonna have to fight her way out of this one.

She disarms the first guard with a hand around his gun, kicking up with her adamantium leg and breaking the arm holding it at the elbow. Pistol in hand, she shoots his partner through the skull, and then him, and starts running through the brush as soon as the bullet has left the barrel. No doubt the sound of a gunshot and a man screaming will bring more goons down on her position, and she's not about to stick around and get access to the facility the hard way.

She's much faster with the new leg, it doesn't get tired, and the socket doesn't chafe, or ride up, or squeeze around her stump, so she's able to move even faster than when she was in the military. It's not enough to outrun the jeep that comes skidding up the road just beyond the treeline, however, and Edith curses as she dives behind a downed tree to avoid the spray of bullets from a mounted assault rifle. 

She waits for the patroller to reload, and takes the opportunity to dash from behind the log to behind an upright tree with a trunk that's thicker than her entire body. “Fuck!” She says “fucking shit!” And grabs her own pistol out of her waistband, taking the safety off and holding both guns up to her chest. She's gonna have to Wild West these sons of bitches and is probably gonna go down in the process having done nothing to take down Weapon Plus. 

She takes a breath, then another, and peeks out from the far side of the tree, aiming at the jeep's front wheel. 

Inhale, exhale, pull the trigger, bang goes the tire. There's another clatter of bullets into the tree, and narrowly missing her, but it will be a hell of a lot harder to chase her with a bum wheel. She manages to count three guards, one with the assault rifle and two with pistols out and starting to close on her. She shoots one through the face, outruns the next wave of bullets from the rifle, and gets behind another tree. This one isn't wide enough to save her a grazing of her dominant shoulder that leaves a hole the width of a finger in her gun arm and hurts like a bitch. 

It makes her angry enough to wait for the second shooter to come close so she can disarm him the same way as the first guard she encountered and then bash his skull in with her boot when she kicks it against the trunk of her hiding place. 

There's another rattle of fire, but it misses her entirely and falls somewhere a bit further away, then a grunt of pain and another gunshot from somewhere close to her position, a strangled cry sounds, and the thud of a body hitting dirt, followed by another, heavier one.

The woods are silent for long enough that she chances another peek toward the jeep, finding the rifleman face down on the ground with a pool of blood forming around him, and nobody else. She approaches the jeep, kicks over the body to find a bullet hole in the man's eye. 

She follows the trajectory of the rifle from where he had been standing before his demise, and sees the muddled shape of a rust coloured hoodie and a military green backpack. Definitely not part of the uniform, She thinks, and starts treading closer, pistol at the ready. 

She kicks over the body again, and stares. 

“Well, fuck.”

* * *

 

The Soldier is used to waking up in weird places ever since he chose to run from his handlers and go into hiding. He's kept moving just to stay off people's radar. He's woken up in back alleys, abandoned houses, and under a lean-to in the woods just yesterday. He hasn't slept in an actual bed in three months. He can't get too comfortable, can't become a familiar face. He knows that even if his previous handlers are dead, new ones will come for him. 

Not if he came for them first, though, which was why he had been casing the Hydra stronghold in Sokovia for weeks. He remembers going for his daily walkabout, marking off bunkers in the woods as he went, when he heard the distant echo of a gunshot. He had investigated, found two bodies, then followed the gunfire when it continued further south, where he had discovered two more bodies and a pair of shooters firing at each other.

The one who wasn't Hydra didn't have much of a chance with a wounded arm and two pistols to the patrolman's body armor and automatic rifle, but she'd lasted longer than he'd expect. When she leaned out of cover to fire a shot it became clear why.

He recognized her, though her name slips through his brain like most of his old memories do, her face is the same though: amber skinned and dark haired with honey-brown eyes that have an intense focus to them. She had been on the table in the lab at the Triskelion, been injected with venom until she told them what they wanted to hear, and then the Soldier had been made to carry her unconscious body into a holding cell while they prepared for a coming assault. She had been missing a leg, then. 

When he comes to consciousness he remembers, too, that he had been shot in those woods, and had lost consciousness when the bullet hit an artery and he had immediately started to bleed out. But instead of being dead or dying on the ground, he's waking up in a musty bed to the gentle sound of music with the volume on low, coming from the opposite corner of the dimly lit room and a steady clack-clacking of fingers on a keyboard.   


He sits up, regretting it immediately when his head whirls and he's forced to lay back down with a grunt. The clacking stops, and a husky, feminine voice says “Yeah, I'd hold off on that if I were you.”

The woman from before comes into view, she's wearing a sports bra and tights and her bicep is wrapped in a thick wad of gauze. The whole room smells like blood and alcohol, and he can see the vodka bottle full of bloody tools sitting on the TV stand across from him. Her arms are crossed over her middle, heavily scarred in a way that they weren’t the last time he saw her. He knows he wouldn’t have missed that much detail when he was observing her interrogation, these are relatively fresh, surgical in some places. The one that travels up the side of her torso is older, paler in comparison.

“You lost a lot of blood.” She says, crisply “Serum or no serum, your body needs to replace it, and if you’re anything like Steve it’s going to take at least a day of you resting before you’ll be back in top shape.”

“Is he here?” The Soldier asks, and her mouth thins like he’s touched a sore spot.

“Nope.” She says, popping the ‘p’ at the end, she heads back to sit in the chair by the desk. “Just you and me, Sarge. We’ve been trying to find you for nine months and I had to trip over you in the woods to make any progress. Figures.”

He had been aware that someone, several someones, were following him early on after he had escaped his handlers, but hadn’t bothered to check to see who they were. Anyone on his tail, he reasoned, was probably looking to bring him back to the fold.

“What does he want with me?”

She smiles a little at that, and he thinks it looks attractive on her, which is a thought he didn’t know he could have about anyone anymore. “He wants to talk to you, to see if Bucky Barnes is still floating around in your head.” She hides her smile behind a hand for a minute and think she wants to say something else, but chooses not to. 

“I don't know who that is.” Not beyond an academic understanding of a name and a written history, anyway. Any memories from before he was the Soldier are fleeting at best. He has flashes of uniforms, dancing, the smell of dust burning on an old radiator, sometimes the scent of certain perfumes makes him think of sex in a way that's vaguely uncomfortable. 

“I assume they squeezed as much of him out of you as they could.” She says, a bit more gently, and it doesn't sound like pity, but maybe something closer to empathy. 

“I'm still not sure what they did. Or why.”

“I assume that's why you're here?”

He nods, and she tilts her head in some kind of agreement. 

“Well, I apologize for fucking the both of us out there, then. I don't think we're gonna find any openings in that stronghold now… If we ever were.” she sighs, and turns back to her laptop. “My next lead on Hydra's meta gene research is in Bucharest, so I'll be leaving tomorrow. The room is paid up to the end of the week, so you're welcome to stay.” The tapping on the keyboard resumes, as her long, stained, fingers move across the laptop fast enough that he wouldn't be able to pick out individual words or letters even if he was standing over the Lieutenant's shoulder.

It's telling how out of it he is that he doesn't wake again until he hears a muffled clatter from the bathroom and swearing followed by a quiet, pained, cry. He's on his feet in seconds, ignoring the stiffness of his leg and the slight sway of the world around him from blood loss, and he crosses the motel room in two quick strides. 

By the bathroom door, he can smell more blood, and smoke, and laboured breathing hissing through someone's teeth. It takes exactly zero effort for him to crush the doorknob in his metal hand and kick the thing open, ready to fight whoever's snuck inside while he was sleeping.

“ _ JESUS _ , Barnes! Don't you fucking  _ knock _ ?!”

The Lieutenant is naked, sitting on the edge of the tub with a needle and thread and a hand mirror. She has a cigarette between her teeth, and the hand that had been holding the needle that's now hanging from the wound in her bicep is covering her chest. Her eyes are red-rimmed and exhausted, her angry face a bit pale and clammy, and he realizes why when he sees just how deep that wound is. But what really shocks him is her leg.

It doesn't register at first, he's so used to his own arm, and the blood loss is messing with his brain enough that it takes a moment for him to understand, exactly,  _ what _ he's seeing.

The banded metal is a charcoal matte black, as sleek as his own arm, and attached at her thigh just above the knee. Unlike his arm, the flesh around it looks healthy, if a bit scarred over, and completely unirritated. 

He's frozen for too long and the Lieutenant makes an irritated noise that snaps him back to attention, bringing his focus back to the burning amber of her glare. 

“Get out so I can finish stitching my goddamn arm in peace, Barnes, and we can compare notes later.”

He obeys, something in him sensing the authority in the woman's tone, and he closes the door behind him. Adrenaline gone, he collapses back into the bed and waits for the stucco ceiling to stop spinning around him.

It still hasn't when the Lieutenant emerges from the bathroom, moving silently over to the bed and staring down at him. She's in a grey teeshirt with a band logo now, and underwear, but her legs are visible when he tilts his head to check.

“Who?” He asks and she huffs a breath through her nose. 

“That's complicated” 

He nods that he understands, and doesn't think she'll respond.

“I was on my way back from a mission,” she says, after a moment, surprising him. “A stronghold in the Registan that had way too much security to be Taliban, but I'd stopped asking questions like a good little jarhead at that point and did my job. We got in, took out thirteen bogeys between us and the room our heat readings were pointing us to, and found a lab working on a system to deploy bioweapons on a large scale. One of those was the Wraith serum, which had a bunch of research behind it showing rapid healing of existing wounds, even fatal ones, on all the rats and dogs and monkeys they'd tested it on.” She sits on the bed next to him, shirt hiking up just enough that he can see the shape of her spine and the sliver of another scar across her flank. There's a faint scent of something citrusy sweet that seems to enter the air around him with her this close, though it's subtle.

“On the way back our Humvee hit spikes and our tires went out, but the walk back to base from there was maybe seven klicks at most so we decided to leave one of the guys with the car and hoof it back. I don't really remember stepping on the mine. I remember waking up without my leg and so high on painkillers I couldn't move. They told me the Taliban had been putting mines in the area for weeks and that they had squads out dealing with them. That was a lie, of course.” She laughs, humorlessly, and he watches her long fingers trace the seam of metal encircling her thigh. “I only found out a week ago that it was Hydra, and that someone had used that sample I took to save me. The fancy new leg was a replacement for the one Hydra shot out from under me… I stabbed you with it, on the bridge.” 

He doesn't remember her stabbing him, but he does have a scar in his abdomen that seems fresher than the others on his skin. She must have got him good if his body didn't manage to heal it completely. Otherwise it all sounds eerily familiar. Lab-made serums and genetic experimentation. He doesn't remember what led him to becoming the Soldier, but parts of her story knock on the door of his memory without quite letting him open it.

He wants to reach out and touch the limb, to see if it feels the same as his arm, but that could just be the blood loss talking. 

“You should eat.” She says, and slides off the bed, moving to where her backpack is sitting on the ancient, floral, couch. She pulls a few MREs out and tosses them at him. 

“I don't-”

“Yeah you do. You had nothing but beef jerky and water in that go bag of yours- yes I looked, I'm not stupid- and if you're anything like Steve you're burning twice as many calories on a slow day as I am working my ass off. Plus you're healing.” She takes her own meal out of the pack and begins the process of shaking one of the packets in one hand. “Steve will be mad as hell if both of us turn up dead.”

There's a brief stare down between the two of them. Her coffee brown eyes lidded and unreadable as he tries to parse out this unwarranted protectiveness she seems to be extending to him. 

He blinks first. He takes the MRE from where it's landed next to him.

* * *

  
  


February, 2015

 

True to her word, Edith leaves at the asscrack of dawn the next morning. Barnes is still alive, if a little pale, and sleeping on his side in the middle of the bed.

She had decided to allow herself five minutes to study him, dark hair covering most of his face, bags under his eyes that look more from stress than anything, scruffy around the face. He's lost weight since that day on the bridge, he seems narrower through the chest and shoulders, though no less powerful for it. He's still a predator, she thinks, just a hungry one now. 

That shouldn't make her want to brush his hair back and pull the covers up around him but she's always been a sucker for a dangerous man. She resists the urge mostly because she doesn't want to lose another limb.

She stuffs a few more MREs in his bag, then leaves another two packets on the nightstand with a glass of water and a roll of gauze, and then leaves the motel before the sun is even up.

It's a ten hour drive to Bucharest, less if she avoids traffic. She rolls down the windows of the old, silver, sedan, and turns her music up.

If she laughs when the first song that starts to play is “Going Out In Style”, she thinks she can be forgiven.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments make me happy and double as a shield against writer's block.


	5. Bag n' Tag

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's some really messed up stuff at the very beginning of this chapter that may be triggering to forces members and veterans. It wasn't easy to write, but I felt like it needed to be here to show certain parts of Edith's psyche. She is a very damaged person, and has been for a very long time, and her actions and reactions reflect that.
> 
> Also there's smut at the end of this chapter.

October 15th, 2010

The bunker is still, quiet, and practically invisible against the sand in the valley below, but once inside she still reminds her team to keep their voices down. The likelihood of the place getting checked on by another patrol is fairly high if they were expecting regular check-ins from one of the bodies now buried behind the bunker. She'll be doubling up the watches tonight while they start downloading and scouring whatever data they can harvest from the series of PCs wired together at the back of the room.

There's four of them in the bunker, and one set of bunk beds, but the lower mattress got soaked in blood when she had put a shotgun shell through the previous owner's chest. Nothing was going to make that mattress worth sleeping on. 

No matter, she was fine with sleeping next to whoever. Castle was probably gonna bitch though, and with good reason: the guy was huge. He would likely take up the entire bed by himself. 

Predictably, he grumbles at the arrangement, and she makes it worse by assigning him to take watch and bunk in with Hayes, who while being the smallest of them, also snores like a freight train. 

That leaves her laying next to Sammy in full armor on a rickety rock hard mattress in a sweltering bunker. The single naked light bulb glowing at the back of the room makes everything look yellowed out and dark, and Sammy smells like several days of sweat and blood and a bit like hand sanitizer. 

“They never send us anywhere nice.” He complains from behind her, as if reading her thoughts. 

“Or anywhere with a shower.” She laughs softly.

“Room service.”

“Silk sheets.”

“An internet connection.”

“Unf. Yes.” She sighs, “My neopets are probably all dead.”

He chuckles, and is quiet for a long while. She closes her eyes and starts to let her brain drift in and out of consciousness and she thinks that he must be asleep as well until he speaks again:

“I'm thinking of getting out.” 

She shifts awake at that, brow furrowing, she can hear the tentativeness in his voice, like he's been thinking about this for a while and has been afraid to say anything. “Out out?”

“Yeah. Full time civilian.”

She presses her lips into a line, flexes and un-flexes her fingers, “When?”

“After this tour. I want to go back to school, I think, pick up a trade.” He sighs, and his hand squeezes her bicep through the heavy fabric. “You could too, you know. You could learn to market your paintings and move out to New York with me. Rent there sucks, and I'll need a roommate anyway.”

“I-” she pauses. Exhales through her nose. She knows she's gone stiff as a board and he's definitely noticed and goddammit she wants to be supportive but- “I've only ever done this.” She says finally “I don't know how to be… normal? I've always done best with a clear direction, and the Corps is about as clear as it gets.”

She feels him nod “Yeah. I had a feeling you'd- I mean-” he makes a frustrated noise that she knows means he's trying to sort a bunch of things in his head at once. “This job isn't good for us. I know you think you're hiding it but I see how stuff affects you.”

“You're projecting, Sammy.”

“I'm not projecti- Christ, Edith. Killing people fucks me up too. I've seen your face after you take out a target up close.”

_ Desperate babbling in Arabic, hands splayed in front of his face like a shield. He's fourty or so and wearing sand-coloured camo and has two pistols that he's fumbled out of a belt that have fallen out of his shaking fingers. “Good God, good God! Please! I have a son!” She shoots him anyway, he's dead with a fist-sized hole through his chest cavity and the wall and floor and mattress behind him are all soaked with blood as he's blown back into the bed itself by the force of the blast. The concrete wall snaps his neck and that kills him as surely as the shot. _

Is she fucked up? The first time she killed a man she cried for hours, now she does little more than bitch about the smell of blood on her clothes and how long the new guns take to reload. She thinks about the likelihood of her taking a bullet somewhere vital and she doesn't feel scared or angry or sad. 

She feels… nothing.

* * *

 

February, 2015

 

He reaches across the mattress to find it cool, and empty. The covers are mussed, and the habitual glass of water at the bedside has been drunk, but the woman he expected to find there, the late riser who spends her mornings attempting to drown herself in coffee, is gone.

Steve sighs, and rolls out of bed, not bothering to get dressed, and wanders into the hallway, to the bedroom across the hall. Edith still escapes to sleep in ‘her room’ when she has nightmares, though it's been months since she's needed to. The door is closed, and he knocks on it gently.

“Edie?”

Silence, not even the creak of bed springs. 

“You in there, dollface?” 

Steve begins to feel the creeping sensation of panic, and does something he promised her he'd never do: He opens her door.

The room, forest green with golden oak furniture, stands empty. Edith isn't in bed, or at her desk, or in the process of finishing the half-complete canvas she had been working on, and he knows before he even checks that her go-bag isn't in her closet. Dread claws at him, and he has to brace himself against the wall to stop himself from lashing out. 

How could she?

_ How could she?! _

He turns away from the empty room and paces back into the master suite with his hands in his hair. She couldn't have gotten far, and she has her go-bag so she's not looking to pitch herself off a bridge, thank God. Steve doesn't think he could handle it if she did something like that. 

Not that he's doing so great now, trying to get himself calm enough to figure out where he needs to start. 

He grabs his phone off the bedside table when he notices the blinking light, and nearly crushes the thing under his thumbs trying to type in his passcode. It takes him three tries, and he nearly throws the thing across the room, but finally he's able to pull up his new messages and find what he's looking for.

_ 03:24 From Edith Crow _

_ “Steve, I can't let you see me turn into that woman from the lab, it would kill me. I want you to remember me the way I was, and not as the animal they're turning me into. Despite everything, you have been the best thing to ever happen to me, and I don't regret a single moment. I love you so much.” _

His chest burns, and he feels like he's drowning all over again, he feels himself sink to his knees on the floor, re-reading her words until they're echoing in his skull like the toll of a bell. 

“Jarvis.” He wheezes, feeling like a ninety five pound asthmatic all over again. 

“Yes Captain?” the cultured, British, voice is calm in a way that does nothing to soothe him. 

“Where is Edith?”

There is a pause “I'm afraid I can't tell you that, Captain.”

“Why the hell not?!” 

“Sir, I apologize, Lieutenant Crow had me delete her Global Positioning Signature from the database.” 

Steve takes as deep a breath as his-  _ burning freezing drowning _ -lungs will allow. Trying to form a question, an argument, anything that will get him to Edith. “What  _ can _ you tell me?”

Another pause, and he hears Edith's voice over the speaker, a recording:

_ “I'm not letting Steve follow me just so he can watch me go crazy and die. I'm gonna do some very bad things to some very bad people, and I don't know if he can handle it.” _

He can hear the distress in her voice, she's speaking in a harsh whisper, but it's there. She's afraid and she doesn't think he can protect her, thinks she needs to be the one to protect him. 

“Forward everything you have on-”

Jarvis interrupts him, “Already done, sir” and Steve's phone dings cheerily in his hand with a data dump of every lead they pulled from Caine's lab and then some.

The document at the top is a list, last edited five hours ago with the name “Francis Freeman” crossed out at the top, followed by “Wolfgang Von Strucker” just beneath, uncrossed. Nine more names follow. 

“This document is live?” he asks. 

“Yes, sir.”

Steve takes another breath, steadier, and then another.

 

* * *

  
  


March, 2015

 

After a week in Bucharest, she's knocked two names off her list:

Dana Krieger and Hugo Weber, a pair of biomechanical engineers, found love while testing new ways to remove and replace body parts on living patients. Dana, skilled with a scalpel and lacking the moral latitude to make her squeamish at the sight of a man begging for his life, had been largely responsible for the discovery of stress-induced meta gene activation. Hugo had fine tuned the process, and sent test subjects to Caine when his darling was finished with them. 

Edith had died that night in Steve's arms, warm and safe and happy. The Jackal, however, cornered both Krieger and Weber in their shared lab and cut them apart piece by piece until they resembled a particularly morbid jigsaw puzzle. 

What was left of Edith hated it. Hated the single-minded focus with which the Jackal took lives. Like a wish made on a monkey's paw, her ability to take revenge on these people, to prevent them from destroying more lives, came at a terrible price. 

The fact that every day had her waking angrier, more bloodthirsty, was almost a relief. The madness simmering under her skin blunting the edges of her guilt.

Strucker still sits at the top of her list, uncrossed, and taunting her, but she moves on to another name and another country. Andrew Dryden, a native to England, performing experimental gene therapy on children as young as six months old in an attempt to recreate Dr.Erskine's results. 

He's on vacation, touring vineyards and beaches off the coast of Spain, and it's easy enough for her to slip into a busy nightclub in Majorca and tail Dryden throughout the evening. 

She sidles up to him at the bar, waiting until he's distracted by a writhing blonde supermodel on the dancefloor, and then spikes his martini with enough ketamine to drop a man twice his size before stepping away.

She returns to the dance floor, keeping an eye on Dryden while she dances. He keeps a hand on his drink, and - frustratingly- doesn't take a single sip. 

Someone slides past her, taking her arms and spinning her close with a steel grip, and the only reason she doesn't lash out is because she has a cover to maintain and she's not rabid enough yet to blow it for a quick fix when she has the whole dose coming. 

“They know you're here.” A familiar voice says in her ear, just loud enough to make out over the thumping bass.

The hand at her waist is metal, she realizes, as the flesh one guides her to a dark corner of the club, where she loses sight of her target. She hisses in irritation and glares up into Barnes steel-blue eyes. “What the fuck, Sarge?!”

“They know you're here.” He repeats. “Caine, and then Krieger and Weber? All found in the same pose? Sloppy.” She swears the corner of his lip turns up in the approximation of a smile. 

Her glare deepens, her fingers digging into his flesh bicep hard enough to bruise. “And how exactly do you know all this?”

“Newspapers. Watching your targets.”

“Why the f-” 

Shadows move past the corner and Barnes's mouth crushes over hers, all teeth and force. It's a distraction, a cover, and she feels a burst of rage that makes her claw her fingers down the bicep she'd been gripping, while the others tangle into his hair. Her blood boils, and he presses her against the wall pinning her hips with his thigh and making her growl against his mouth. 

She's burning, boiling hot and bites down on his lip, drawing hot, coppery, blood onto her tongue and making herself dizzy with it. She wants to fight him. She wants to fuck him. She wants to wrap her fingers around his throat and watch him pound into her like an animal in heat. Something, anything, to help her tame this wild instinct that's eating her up like wolves to a fresh kill.

When he pulls away, she whines at the back of her throat, inhaling the smell of spilled booze around them and the sweat and metal coming off his body. His pupils are blown, and so focused that she feels Dead Edith emit a frisson of fear, but he simply runs his thumb over his bleeding lip and then shifts his gaze to the red smear. 

“Dryden's gone.” He says, and she glances for any members of the Doctor's posse on the dancefloor or at the bar, and sees none.

“No thanks to you.” She says, and thinks she sounds a bit breathless. “I had him.”

“No you didn't.” 

“Fucking pain in my fucking ass.” She snarls, and drags his mouth back to hers, feeling his metal fist grip the back of her shirt while the other slides down to her ass, hiking her up closer until she can feel the press of him through his jeans. 

“We need a room.” He says, and she drags him to the staircase that attaches to the adjoining hotel. Her room is on the second floor, next to the stairwell in case she needed a quick getaway, but now she's just happy it's less ground to cover to get Barnes inside. 

He's hardly dressed for a club, in a hoodie and blue jeans, but she doesn't care for his lack of disguise when she jumps up and wraps both legs around his hips, driving him back toward the bed with the force of her body until he's sprawled against the duvet and biting at her jaw. The metal hand, still gripping her shirt, tugs until the seams rip apart over her back, and she breaks the zipper on his hoodie in retaliation, taking her nails up his abdomen from under his shirt, feeling them skip over scars and coiled muscle. He wraps his fist around her ponytail and pulls her head back to drag his teeth over her throat until her legs shake and he flips her onto her back, pulling her body into an arch. 

Clothes come off in a series of vicious attacks that leave them both bruised and bloody. Where Steve had been smooth, Barnes Is pockmarked with signs of his past, the knotted and gnarled shoulder supporting the metal arm like an epicenter where scars radiate out across his body. His own hand, the flesh one, traces over her own marks like he's memorizing them, like they're something novel. His hand traces the seam of her thigh where it connects to the prosthetic and he makes a noise in the back of his throat that makes her pulse pound.

He pulls her back into that perfect arch when he fucks into her hard enough to shift the bed, thick and heavy and hard as the steel of his arm. She's burning with it, panting from exertion, growling and biting and scratching until her body slams into an orgasm that makes her scream. He fucks her mouth with his tongue, hungry and laser-focused as he pounds into her fast and vicious. She cums again, with blood in her mouth and under her fingernails and pumping through her veins like boiling oil, and again, when he sinks his teeth into her clavicle and his hips stutter against her, once, twice, and he courses into her.

It's clear neither of them are done. Barnes is enhanced, and she supposes she is too in a way, and so it's almost second nature to use his own weight against him and force him onto his back, beneath her, riding him hard with her nails buried in the meat of his chest. He slams his hips up, meeting her on the down stroke and snarling as his hands grip her hips in a way she thinks should hurt way more than it does. When his metal hand finds her throat, there's half a second of fear, of memory, and then pure defiance as she leans into it and shatters apart on top of him, pulsing and gripping at his cock where its buried between her legs and filling her with liquid heat.

There's blood and spend and sweat covering the duvet cover. The smell is astounding, but for some reason she feels calmer than she has in weeks, when she tilts over and falls limply against the mattress, inhaling it like oxygen at the top of a mountain. She feels pleasantly cool, even when Barnes rolls over and buries his face in her chest, an arm over her ribs. 

It's the best sleep she's had since leaving New York.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Suggested listening:  
> Blood in the Cut - K.Flay


	6. FUBAR

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Steve gets his mind blown, Jack contemplates her mortality, and Bucky finds a sense of control in a very strange place.
> 
> Oh and there's some smut I guess.

November, 2011

 

Red paint is caked up to Edith's elbows, interrupted by streaks of cobalt as she slides her fingers across the canvas in broad strokes. 

It's her fourth attempt, and she's snapped enough brushes in frustration and cried bitterly into no fewer than six bottles of beer in the process. Everything she owns is stained with paint and tears at this point. The tanktop she's wearing is a lost cause, as is the sock covering the still-healing ruin of her leg. She's going to need to scrub her floors with paint thinner if she wants to keep her deposit on this new apartment.

She needed to get the image of his face out of her mind. The death mask of her best friend, of the man she called “brother”. Eyes closed, parted lips, sleeping but not, Sammy is gone.

He had been choking, drowning in his own blood and sucking in air through the wound in his chest cavity. That noise, that horrible noise, would haunt her until she died. His hand had taken hers, he knew she couldn't save him, stared his death down with a kind of naked focus that terrified her. He had held her fingers to her chest and gripped, hard as he could in the fading of consciousness and said it:

_ “Don't forget.”  _

And she couldn't. She watched him die and then spent eight days hiding under a tarp in the middle of the desert with his body buried in the sand beside her. She had read something once, about sand and nitrates and stopping a body from rotting in the sun. And when they had dug him out he was pale and his face looked like he had lost weight too fast, sunken eyed and sunken cheeked and far, far too still.

She wanted to capture it, upload it from her brain to the canvas and then delete the pain from her memory. The torment that rolled through her in hot, agonizing, waves was smeared in black and blue and bloody red beneath her shaking fingers.

When it's done, she passes out on the floor.

 

* * *

 

March 2015

 

She's not quite decided if she enjoys having a shadow. After Dryden, she moves on to the next name on her list, sitting in her car in the parking garage of a French hospital as she waits for Henri Haddenson to finish his shift and walk the hundred feet from the elevator door to his too-shiny Audi parked directly beside her. 

She spots Barnes leaning against the concrete wall by the elevator, and they make eye contact long enough that she's able to signal for him to shift to the other side so that he's out of direct line of sight with the security cameras. Idiot.

He doesn't move on Haddenson until she's already smashed the man's skull against the side of his vehicle to stun him, and dragged him into the dirty back seat of her vehicle. 

Barnes strolls over, offers her a set of hand and ankle cuffs, and she can't help but smile.

They fuck again after she kills Haddenson. Bleeding the primal violence from her body with another vicious round of sex that leaves them both insensate on the floor of their victim's personal laboratory. Barnes seems to get something out of it, even if she leaves him with scars and bruises that seem even more severe than last time. 

The third time he finds her back in Majorca and they finish the job with Dryden in the man's own home, and when she shoots the doctor in the back of the skull after extracting every last drop of information from his beaten body Barnes is there to bring her down from the blood-struck high that boils through her like a fever. 

After the fourth time, she decides she likes this strange relationship. They make it back to her motel that evening, the kill less bloody than usual and leaving her itching and irritated but not immediately triggering her. It only serves to make her claw into the bulk of his shoulders even harder, to the point that she ends up stitching up a jagged line that won't stop bleeding afterward, apologizing and cursing as she threads the curved needle through his flesh.

"I'm honestly surprised this hasn't already happened." She sighs after, leaning her forehead against his bicep.

Barnes absently plays with the end of her braided hair, running the loose edge of it between his fingers. He's always strangely affectionate after they do this, Jack would never have pegged the Winter Soldier as a cuddler, but he's always spent the aftermath seeking some kind of gentle contact from her.

She can't say she minds.

"It would have healed on its own." He says and she sighs again, aggravated. 

"Not the point. It's just showing me that I'm getting worse." 

"You already knew that." He says, and tugs the braid hard enough to be irritating. She glares up at him for his trouble, but he's still relaxed and soft around the edges. "It doesn't bother me. It feels… good."

She snorts, raising a dubious eyebrow. They both have their reasons to take out the people behind the weapons program that made them, and Jack had been military long enough to understand the value of a good victory fuck, but generally that didn't involve more bloodshed, and generally one of the participants isn't borderline rabid. Barnes let's his metal hand rest on the back of her neck, cool and oddly soothing over her chaotic inner monologue.

"See?" He says "It feels like something I can control."

At least one of them can. She leans into the touch and feels a bit of the guilt flicker out. She knows she isn't forcing this… whatever this is, on Barnes. 

She just worries what will happen the day he  _ can't _ control her anymore.

* * *

 

March, 2015

 

The list updates out of order, and he checks it often enough that Steve knows a person is dead before the news does. 

The Pharaoh Murders are subject to the twenty four hour coverage most breaking news stories are these days, with some stations choosing to go into the gorey details with the aid of a TV psychologist and a forensic specialist to argue over the minutiae. Doctor Caine was choked to death with hemp rope, Doctors Krieger and Weber were dismembered, Doctor Haddenson was shocked with a defibrillator after having his bones broken, and Doctor Dryden was strung up and beaten and then executed with a bullet to the brain. The expert guests all argue over motive, but they agree that the killings are being done by a man, and are somehow sexual in nature.

Steve would laugh if he wasn't so horrified.   

He had known, logically, that Edith had done some brutal things in her past. Her file was so heavily redacted in places that it was easy to read between those blacked out likes and see the red underneath. She had told him, once, that The Jackal was half her ability to survive the unsurvivable, and half the way she could shut her humanity behind a wall in the name of “advanced interrogation”.  _ Seeing _ the savage trail of evidence she leaves behind is another thing entirely.

He tracks her to a villa in Majorca, where Doctor Andrew Dryden was found dead half a day before. The place is swarming with police, but one look at the uniform and they let him pass without a fuss. He doesn't often play the Captain America card for personal things, but he makes an exception this time, stepping into the open concept living room and seeing the body where it remains posed in the center of the room with its hands across its chest. 

The body is bruised so thoroughly it looks like a disease has spread through it, green and purple and red and blue, Steve can't make out the face between the hole blown through it and the swelling around one eye. The room itself is splattered in blood, Dryden's teeth picked out with individual evidence flags across the hardwood floor and Persian rug. The flag sitting on the dining room table is what draws Steve's attention though, out of the way of most of the Carnage. 

There's a pair of handprints, one he easily matches to the same dimensions as Edith's, and another, larger, and uneven, next to it. Steve thinks it might be Dryden's but Edith would never let him get close enough. 

Steve steps out onto the deck behind the dining room, and quietly asks Jarvis if there's any security footage from the cameras he spotted on the exterior of the building. His phone beeps,  and the AI has already queued up the relevant video.

What he sees steals his breath.

She's in a dark hoodie and jeans, and not alone, another figure stalks behind her like a predator, staying close as they slip into the house through a basement window. He catches the barest glimpse of her face in profile, but the resolution isn't high enough to make out any details. The footage skips to another camera near where he's standing, and he see's Dryden scrambling backwards against the window, bruised and bloody, as another person steps forward, long brown hair and pale skin, and a metal hand that reaches out and takes Dryden by the throat.

Bucky's head snaps to the side, as if someone behind him is speaking, and he throws Dryden to the ground. The doctor kneels on the floor, obviously coughing, and then Edith steps into the picture, her hood still up and wearing a mask that covers the bottom of her face. She's asking questions, Steve thinks, and the doctor is shaking his head, then raising his hands to her in supplication. She aims a pistol at the back of his head and fires.

Steve has a thousand questions, and just as many feelings all threatening to boil over and send him into a panic attack. Confusion, disbelief, fear, worry, love, hope, and anger all fight for his attention and then go stunningly silent at the next thing that happens. 

Bucky crowds Edith against the window, a hand pulling her mask down, the other pulling her hips against his own, and kisses her. 

Edith's fingers tangle in Bucky's hair, and her legs come up around his hips, balanced first against the window and then by his hands supporting her by gripping her ass, thrusting against her roughly until he drags her away from the camera's field of vision.

Steve takes a stuttering breath. “Jarvis, can you purge these from the security system, and any other copies that might be out there?” 

“Lieutenant Crow already ordered me to do so. This was her personal copy.”

He thanks the AI, and then steps back inside the house, looking at the table with fresh eyes.

Bucky would have backed her against the wood, lifted her to sit on it. Would he have taken the time to undress her fully? To savor the sight of the flush painting her face and chest that pretty pink? Edith would be wound up, kissing him like she was starving for it, she always kissed Steve like she couldn't get enough; But Bucky was always impatient, and especially here, he would be desperate for something to tether him to the physical. He would simply tug away her jeans and unzip his enough to get his cock out. 

Steve thinks he should feel angry about it, but instead he's just unbearably aroused, and thankful that his suit has a cup large enough to hide the painfully hard erection he's developed at the thought of Bucky's hands around Edith's hips and Bucky's mouth devouring Edith's rough moans as he fucks her against the tabletop. Steve's brain supplies the idea of how he could fit into that arrangement, how easily it could be him snapping his hips against Edith's while Bucky guides him from behind.

He lines up his hand next to the bloody prints. Steve's hands are larger than both, broader, though Edith has longer fingers, Bucky's metal hand is barely a smear against the wood but he can see the impression of his palm. They all fit, Steve thinks, together, and he's glad that neither Bucky or Edith are alone.

He leaves the villa, checking his phone again to find another name crossed off the list, and only one left other than Strucker. 

Steve catches the next flight to Latvia, and learns everything he can about Doctor Jameson Clark.

* * *

 

April, 2015

 

“Not that I'm complaining…” She says, pausing mid-step to light her cigarette “but if you want to keep doing this you could just get in the car whenever I leave instead of doing whatever it is you do to follow me.”

Barnes falls into step next to her, emerging from the alleyway where he suspected she might spot him. The fact that he had let her see him in the first place goes against his Hydra training in a way that feels satisfying. Choices. He has choices here, and it feels  _ good _ .

Not as good as hunting with her has been, though, which is the point. 

“We're easy to spot together.” He says, and admires the way her lips quirk upwards. “Border guards would get suspicious if we both set off the metal detectors.”

She snorts at that “Sarge, I do  _ not _ set off metal detectors. They don't pick up adamantium. I'd pay good money to see it happen to you though.”

“Target?” he says, blatantly changing the subject.

“Currently in pursuit. The brunette in the leather jacket and dress slacks.” She tilts her chin forward where a figure is walking at a similar pace to herself and Barnes. 

He's not sure when his brain started thinking of himself as Barnes again, maybe since she started using it. He still doesn't feel like Bucky, or James, or whatever people used to call him before he became the Soldier, but Barnes feels like it fits when she says it, and that's good enough for him. She's been Jack to him since the first time he called her “Lieutenant” post-coital and she nearly choked to death on the MRE porridge she was eating.

He knows it's not her real name, and she  _ knows _ he knows in the same way she knows he's not ready to be Bucky, and for all the weight that name carries. She lets him join her in her vendettas to satisfy his own, and that's enough for him while he tries to sort out the fractured parts of his memory.

The target ahead of them is one Barnes does recognize, though, one of the scientists behind the drugs that altered his brain chemistry and the electric chair built to activate them. The man's face is seared into Barnes’ memory in a way he knows he won't be able to shake. He's helped ground Jack when she's gone feral before, something chemical Hydra's done that she tells him will kill her soon, but Barnes may just watch her rip through this one until he's nothing but a splatter on a wall. 

He feels powerful. This ability to pull her back from the vicious haze that overtakes her is the most in control over anything he's ever felt. It's easy, satiating her hunger with their violent coupling or a steady hand against her throat until she comes back from the edge of her bloodlust. He can choose that, too, when to pull her out of that primal space, and for some reason she trusts him with that kind of power.

She coaxes him away from his own broken thoughts as well, giving him something to focus on, a mission or her body or the rasp of her nails across his skin. Barnes has always known violence, but Jack has shown him the other side of that coin.

“We have a tail.” She murmurs, bringing him closer, lacing their fingers together like they're a couple out for a walk. “Directly on our six. Can you hear them?”

He can. Footsteps that trail out of step from their own. The street they're on is otherwise fairly quiet, considering the hour. 

“Keep moving, we can lose him once we pass Clark's place and then loop back around.” He says “He takes a while to fall asleep anyway, and we'll need to move him somewhere secure.”

“Don't tell me he has a roommate.”

“Older sister. He lives in the basement.” Barnes watches the doctor turn off the sidewalk and walk up onto the porch, then disappear behind the door. 

“You've been casing the place already?” She asks, and he makes an affirmative noise. “Mmm, good, I was worried I'd have to wait.” She's all wound up, frenetic energy and arousal pouring off her already.

“Anything for you, Doll,” he says and thinks the expression feels familiar on his lips. Had he been flirtatious once? He doesn't remember, but it feels good when she grins at him with that heat behind her eyes. 

“Anything?” She says, voice dropping an octave “How about after we lose this bozo you take me somewhere quiet and I can sit on your-”

He hears the crack of a gunshot and raises his metal arm just in time to block the bullet from connecting with Jack's skull. He turns and sees the doctor standing on his porch, rifle in hand, and before he can get eyes on the rest of the situation Jack ducks under his arm and bolts toward Clark like a missile, ready to explode on contact. 

It's too public, even this late, and the gunshot has already made several of the neighbour's lights flick on in their windows. Barnes curses, and chases after her, watching the Doctor's second shot go wide and then the third fall short just before she tackles him back through his front door. He screams, gun clicking ineffectually against its empty clip as he tries to pull the trigger. She kicks the weapon away, then grabs him by the throat with her nails on either side of his windpipe, and Barnes is steps away from her when a voice rings out from nearby:

“Edith! Stop!”

Barnes head snaps sideways at the sound. A man is standing there, familiar, tall and broad shouldered and blonde. His face scratches at something in Barnes’ head, both recent memory and not, and when Jack doesn't release her grip the man speaks again, sounding desperate “This isn't you, Edie. Please.”

Steve. His name is Steve Rogers. Barnes, The Soldier, Bucky, pulled him out of the Potomac when he fell into the river. Steve had been his mission, and he had failed it. 

Barnes snaps back to the present and moves forward, pulling Jack away from Clark's unconscious and bleeding body and dragging her back, metal hand against the column of her neck, steadying her quivering form. He looks to Steve and jerks his head in an indication to follow, and then lifts Jack up so her feet don't drag on the ground as he runs from the scene.

He finds the alley he'd met her in, looping around to return, and then steps through the back door of one of the adjacent buildings. 

The room in dark, and musty, but the storefront has been empty for some time and this storage room had been an ideal place to take Clark, and to lay low while he waited for Jack to show. Now, he sits her on one of the dusty work tables and lets her cling to him with grasping nails that claw over his neck in a way that makes him shudder with his own hunger. “Jack.” He says, and he know he sounds rough against her ear “Gimme five minutes, can you do that?” She whines, but nods jerkily and he pulls away from her. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” Barnes turns slowly, looking Steve up and down. He's wearing a teeshirt, flannel, and too-tight jeans by way of a disguise, and Barnes can't help but think Steve should have thought more about hiding his face. 

“I should ask you the same thing.” Steve responds, lowly. He looks like he wants to shove his way past Barnes and get to Jack, but that's not going to happen. “Where have you been? When did she find you?”

Barnes doesn't have time for this. Jack needs him, needs something to hold onto while she comes down. He can hear her breathing hard against her own knees just behind him. “Sokovia.” He bites out “Two months ago. Now leave so I can make sure she's okay.”

“I'm not going anywhere ”

He exhales hard through his nose, trying to keep himself from setting Jack off with his own urge for aggression. “Whoever it was that you knew, they're gone.”

Steve's face is a tapestry of emotion, grief, anger, fear. His eyes dart to Jack, who hasn't looked over from where she's sitting, laser focused on reigning herself in, and then back to Barnes. “I'm not leaving.” He says, voice uneven, and Barnes wants to force him out the door, but knows the violence will only make it worse.

A moment passes, and Barnes curses, then says “Fine.” And turns his back on the larger man, banking on a sense of trust he doesn't even have.

Jack's eyes are glazed over when he steps close to her again, and he runs the cold metal of his palm over her face and neck, she focuses on him then, intense and hungry, and he unzips the bloody hoodie wrapped around her body, letting the cool air soothe her skin. His own comes off next, and she lets out a soft groan at the sight of his skin, already scarred over. “You won't hurt me, Jack.” He says, and it's like a signal, something slotting into place that makes her drag him close and sink her teeth into his lip and her nails into his shoulder and the back of his neck. 

He hears Steve inhale sharply behind them, but ignores it in favour of pulling Jack's hips to the edge of the table and yanking her jeans down before pushing between her legs and letting her grind against him, growling as he grasps her hair and sinks his own teeth into her shoulder. Her retaliation scores his bicep with bleeding trails that sting and burn and spur him forward, gripping her thigh with bruising strength and dragging his jean-covered cock against the searing wetness between her legs. 

Nothing makes sense to Barnes but this. His life as the Soldier was violence and focus set to work against people who didn't deserve it, the urges so ingrained in his training that he can't shake it. Here, with Jack, his violence has purpose, and even when they're hunting a target his focus is always on her. 

Now, he uses it to free himself from his jeans and press himself into the tight, delicious, heat that squeezes around him like a vice. Hot and perfect, and feels her hands grip his shirt and rip it apart down the front, just so she can drag her nails down his chest and hear him groan. He fucks into her hard, feeling the way she writhes against him and listening to her cry out as he uses her hair to pull her body convex against his, teeth leaving her shoulder to scrape against her chest. He feels her throb around him, and he has to force down the urge to cum right then.

There's a quiet groan from behind them, and Barnes doesn't have the attention to spare to turn and check to see what Steve is up to, he just redoubles his efforts while Jack's hip bruises beneath his fingers and her cunt squeezes around him until she cries out. 

He brings their mouths together, biting and violent, his tongue thrusting into her mouth and getting bit for it's trouble, but the taste of blood just makes her moan, and he feels the sweet pulse of her around him, coaxing him to the edge.

He breaks like a wave on a rock face when her nails rip across his shoulder blades and she sucks on his tongue with another low moan that goes straight between his legs. He cums so hard he sees stars, and his brain goes fuzzy with static. Jack continues to writhe on him, panting against his mouth. She forces the remains of his shirt off his shoulders, sticky with blood, and trails her fingers through her mess a little more gently. His hand leaves her hair, pressing against her throat when she pulls away from their savage kiss, leaning her back until she's flat against the table, spread out for him like a meal. Her hands are red, and they trail down her body leaving smears of it like paint. His blood on her skin, her coffee coloured eyes hazy and hooded as they look into his. He resumes his rough pace within her, knowing he won't last nearly as long the second time, but she keens underneath him as he finds that perfect, punishing, rhythm that makes her cum in waves over and over until she's exhausted, and he's able to let himself fall over the edge behind her once more.

It takes a moment for him to come back to reality, and he presses a kiss to her jaw, “You with me, Jack?”

She nods her head, eyes closed, and he presses another kiss to her sternum, then her mouth, before picking her up and bringing her over to the sleeping bag he had laid out for himself. He lays her gently inside, moving her hair out of her face where it's escaped her ponytail, and sits back on the cold floor with a tired sigh.

When he shifts his attention back to Steve, the man's eyes are blown wide, and his jeans are even tighter. Not the normal response to your former best friend fucking your girlfriend right in front of you, Barnes thinks, but nothing about any of this is normal. 

The other man swallows, and when he speaks its low and hungry in a way that makes Barnes wonder If he has the energy to go one more time, not the smartest idea he's ever had, but he's fuckdrunk and exhausted. 

“Is she alright?” 

Barnes nods, glancing over to where she's dozing and out of it like a junkie. “She'll be like this for maybe an hour at most.” He succumbs to the urge to reach over and press cool fingers to her forehead, watching her come down. 

“And you'll just-” Steve's eyes shift to the bloody work table “Until…?”

Barnes sighs through his nose, feeling like he's trying to give “the talk” to an overgrown kid. “Yeah. We gonna have a problem, Captain?”

Steve stays quiet, looking between Jack and Barnes with that same confused and aroused expression. “Are you hurt?”

That's a complicated question. He can feel her marks all over him, healing and leaving his body flaked with drying blood, and while he's sore it feels grounding, and pleasant in a way he didn't think he could feel anymore. Hydra had burnt so much out of him; pain and pleasure responses, empathy, arousal, but Jack is pulling him back by inches. 

“No.” He says. It's the easiest answer.

Steve steps closer and sits at Jack's opposite side on the floor, face flushed. “When she left, I thought I might never see her again.” He says “She said she was going to do things I couldn't handle, that she didn't want me to see her go crazy.”

“And you didn't listen.” Barnes feels another memory scratch at the back of his skull. “You never do.”

“You used to say I was a stubborn punk. Never knew when to quit.”

Wry, Barnes actually feels himself smile, “That does sound familiar.”  

They're quiet for a long moment, listening to Jack's even breathing and the rattle of the building's ventilation system. “I know you're not the same person.” Steve says, just above a whisper, “You've been through so much. Hard not to change when it's the only way to survive… and Edith is -was- never going to come out the other side of this looking like the same person either.” He looks like he wants to reach out and touch her, to hold her to him and protect her from this monster that's infecting her. “I still love her, I want to be there, whatever that means.”

“She's dying.”

“I know.” 

Barnes sighs, he's tried not to overthink that part of things either. Jack hasn't talked about it much except for that first morning they'd woken up together. His attachment to her in the first place is another one of his little rebellions against Hydra's programming. The Soldier shouldn't want anyone, or feel anything, but Barnes does, and he doesn't like the idea of Jack not being here to anchor him. 

“Couple of broken white boys, I fucking swear.” The woman herself groans from the sleeping bag, she sits up, looking strung out and shaky. Her eyes are still hazy. “I told you not to follow me.” She says, and it's directed at Steve. 

“You knew I wouldn't listen.” He says and shifts, looking like he's going to try to touch her, before hesitating. 

She grumbles, pulling herself out of the bag and looking to stand on shaky legs before Barnes stops her and gets up, going to grab a protein bar and his canteen from his backpack. 

“I'm not going to apologize for doing what I have to do.” She rasps

“I know.”

“This isn't going to stop. I'm going to get worse.”

“I know.”

“Then why didn't you listen to me!?”

“Because I love you.” Barnes hears Steve breathe, and he still hasn't moved any closer, but the room almost seems smaller. “Because I wasn't there for Peggy, or for… for Bucky. If you disappear I want to at least be able to say I stayed with you until the end.”

“I'm with you ‘til the end of the line.” Barnes doesn’t realize he's said it out loud until the room goes silent around him. The force of the memory hitting him is like a grenade. 

Standing outside a door in Brooklyn, Steve had been smaller; skinny, and the same height as Jack is now. His mother is dead, and Bucky is helping him with the sad business of sorting through the last of Sara Roger's affairs before they head home to the apartment he and Steve share, too poor to afford more than a one bedroom place in a crumbling brick building. And Bucky says those words to him, a hand on his shoulder, bringing Steve back from the swirling darkness of his thoughts.

“Yeah.” Steve says. “Always.” 

She doesn't seem to know what to say to that, and Barnes returns to her, pressing food into her hands and taking a swig from the canteen himself. She eats, not looking like she wants to but knowing she'd be a hypocrite if she didn't, and sucks down water with a bit more enthusiasm. Her gaze is still cloudy and he knows she's going to need another fix sooner rather than later.  “Goddamn saps. Both of you.” She hums. “You should have just let Clark shoot me, spare everyone the trouble of waiting for the day I can't stuff the monster back in the box.”

Steve frowns, and Barnes knows she's being logical about the situation but finds himself denying her anyway. “You know I'm not going to give one of those fuckers the satisfaction.” He says and pushes a lock of loose hair behind her ear. 

“Then who's gonna be the one to do it? You? How about you, Steve, are you gonna put a bullet in my brain when I go nuclear and start hurting people I don't mean to?” 

Steve makes a pained noise in the back of his throat “Please don't talk like that, you know I couldn't-”

“If I have to.” Barnes says, and Steve looks at him, betrayed. 

“Is that a promise, Sarge?” Jack's hazy eyes manage to focus, meeting his gaze, “You swear that when there's nothing left of my mind, you'll kill me?”

His hand cups her jaw, firm but gentle. “Anything for you, Doll.” 

“Sap.” She says, and kisses his palm. 

Steve watches them with his eyes wide as saucers, brows drawn together. He'd watched them fuck not ten minutes before, but this is what it takes to hurt him. 

“I can't believe you're even discussing this.” He says, angry.

Jack grumbles, “You'd ask the same thing if our positions were reversed, you  _ know _ you would.”

“That's different.” Steve protests.

“It's not.  It's really, really, not.” She pulls away from her spot between them, walking to where her clothes have fallen and digging through her pockets for her pack of cigarettes. She wrestles herself into her jeans, not bothering to put her hoodie on, and walks over to the door. “I need air.” She says, and leaves Steve and Barnes to their own devices.

“Is this who you are, now?” Steve says quietly, fixing him with a glare “You'll have sex with her and then kill her?”

Barnes bites his tongue. He wants to tell Steve to mind his own goddamn business, that this was why she left in the first place, but the more he thinks about it the more he realizes that this coldness that he's capable of is part of the Soldier, and Steve is absolutely right.

“If that's what she needs me to be.” He says.

“It's not fair!” Steve snarls, and stands, looming over Barnes.

“It's not.” He agrees “That's why we're here. That's why she's dying, and why I can't trust my own mind, and why you feel the need to clean up everyone's mess.” Barnes stands too, facing Steve fully and taking in the deluge of emotions in the other man's eyes. “If you don't like it, do something about it.” 

He isn't expecting that “something” to be a hard, hungry crush of lips against his, and broad hands on his hips, backing him against the wall. He isn't expecting his entire body to respond the way it does either, with grasping fingers that dig into Steve's hair and drag him closer. He tastes like coffee and mint chewing gum and salt, and Barnes swears he's hallucinating for a solid minute until Steve's hands smooth over his sides and grip his sides in a way that's grounding and real. He wants more, deeper, harder, and Barnes nips at Steve's lip and presses their tongues together in a slow, tidal, rhythm. 

When they separate, Steve's mouth is berry-red and wet, his eyes lidded and warm as he looks down at Bucky with blue eyes that call up memories of freezing Brooklyn winters and charcoal stained fingers leaving their prints on China white dishes.

“I thought you were dead, Buck.”

“I thought you were shorter.”

“I thought the two of you would never figure your shit out, thank Christ.” Jack had, apparently, slipped back inside without either of them noticing, “I'm heading back to my motel. There's an actual bed there and a shower, both of which I need after all this.” 


	7. Foxhole

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is no plot here. There is fluff, there is smut, there is domestic crackery, but if you're looking for the plot it's on vacation until next chapter.

November 18th, 2010

 

"Thank you for bringing him home."

It catches Edith off guard, as does the hand on her shoulder, Sammy's mom is so short she only reaches Edith's chin and is hunched with grief and exhaustion. The funeral itself had been loud, with singing and open weeping, and organ music that filled the chapel with an energy that seemed almost uplifting. The burial was smaller, somehow, and quiet. Sammy's body was lowered into the ground encased in shining black wood and golden finishings and handfuls of dirt being tossed by those closest to him.

His mother, his seventeen year old sister, his twenty year old brother, a few other family members, a schoolmate he'd stayed close with. Edith was last, and her hand had shaken when she let the soft, black, soil fall from between her fingers onto the lacquered surface hiding her best friend's dead face.

"I didn't." She says, and it comes out so quiet that she's not positive the other woman hears her. 

"Oh darling," she says "You did everything you could."

Edith feels sick, thinks of everything she didn't do. Her own pain and exhaustion had clouded her judgement and she hadn't been able to find a way to call for help or seal his wound before it killed him. Everything she could? No. She'd let Sammy slip through her fingers like the overconfident, selfish, angry, idiot she was. 

She'd been so angry at him. He'd told her he was leaving, wanted her to follow him, to give up everything she'd fought to achieve as a marine, and then promptly taken a bullet for her the next day before he could make good on any of it.

And what the fuck was she was supposed to do with that?

 

* * *

 

April, 2015

 

If they're expecting a threesome that night, She thinks, they are all going to be sorely disappointed.

Jack stands under the shower until her skin turns scarlet and then falls down face-first  into the middle of the bed with a groan, exhausted. Barnes went on a walkabout, ostensibly to get an idea of how fucked they are but probably to clear his head, and Steve is staring at her from his place in one of the wingback chairs with his phone in his hand.

If he realizes he's still scrolling, but not looking at the damn screen, he's sure not dropping any hints.

“You gonna come over here or do I have to get up.” She says, flopping an arm in his direction, and he comes to her in a single stride, kneeling by the side of the bed so that they're face to face.  

“I'm sorry.”

“What for?”

“Everything.”

“Steve. Shut up and kiss me.” 

He does, and its soft and tender and sweet in a way she can admit she missed. Barnes is an adrenaline rush, kissing her like he's going to devour her whole, Steve kisses her like he's learning something new every time, like he's memorizing the slow shift of lips and tongue against his own. She can appreciate both, loves when Steve, gets more aggressive or when Barnes gets soft around the edges, and if she wasn't so goddamn tired she'd see what form they'd take with each other.

Instead, she drags Steve up into the bed, and tucks her head under his chin, wrapping her arms around him. 

“I'm sorry I left. I didn't want to hurt you.” She murmurs against his neck. 

“I'm just glad you weren't alone, sweetheart.” He kisses the top of her head, rubbing soothing circles over her back, making her drowsy. “I was afraid you would get hurt, and I wouldn't be there to help you.”

“Barnes is as stubborn as you are, don't let him tell you otherwise.” She grins “He fucking tailed me after Sokovia, kept running into him before I hit my marks.”

“World's weirdest meet-cute?”

“Mmm…” she agrees, She had blocked Steve from most of her thoughts, but she's not ashamed to admit she missed him. She had given herself permission to mourn until the smell of him had left her stolen hoodie, but two days wasn't enough time to shove those feelings down. She'd innured herself to violence, to sleeping in uncomfortable places, to the high she got from the taste of someone's blood or the feeling of flesh tearing under her teeth and nails. Loving Steve was another thing entirely. 

She felt something for Barnes too, something beyond the physical. His strange way of flirting and his easy acceptance of her new, more feral, nature. The way he could pull her back from that needle-thin edge she was balanced on. 

He cards broad fingers through her damp hair, inhaling deeply and her eyes are getting heavy when he speaks again.

“How are you, really?”

She grunts, non-committal, and he presses “ _ Edith _ .”

It's uncomfortable, her name, another thing she left behind in New York. Another thing to mourn.

“It gets harder to keep things under control every day.” She says “I feel this… compulsion? Arousal? I see blood and I want to taste it, or see how it feels on my skin. It gives me this high that's better than any drug I've ever been on.” She shivers in his arms, even thinking about it makes her itch.

“Sex helps?” He asks quietly, hands still petting her hair in the same slow, soothing, strokes.

“It helps ground me, I think.” She considers, sighing against his chest “I'm sorry you had to… that me and him… shit.”

Steve shifts at that, “I think maybe I should be jealous, or angry maybe but… I'm… not.”

She smiles, kissing his neck gently, “I had a feeling there was something just a little queer about you, Cap.”

He makes a noise at that, like he doesn't know what to think, and she remembers exactly how the military treats people who don't follow “Standard Operating Procedure”. 

“Does it help if I tell you that I went out with one of my desk jockeys while I was on base? She was this pretty little redhead with freckles that went all the way down to her t-”

He rolls on top of her and she's laughing then, into his mouth as he kisses her hard and heavy, hands gripping her waist pulling her against his hips with a groan of appreciation.

He's rutting against her, still fully clothed, when the door clicks open and Barnes walks in, quirking an eyebrow at the sight of the two of them.

Steve looks like an altar boy caught fist-in-trou by his favourite nun. Same look he had when she caught him and Barnes making out in their hidey hole, actually.

And fuck if it doesn't make her reconsider the whole threesome idea when they look at each other like they want to rip off their clothes and go at it like a pair of animals.

She's so tired. She could definitely stay up to watch though, at least. 

“Clark's in hospital.” Barnes says, all business, and she feels some of her more primal urges sit the fuck down and pay attention. “I managed to use your phone to purge the security systems on the block. Cops are wandering around questioning people but the neighbors are saying it was a feral dog.”

“Ouch.” She says, feigning offense. “That's a real unsubtle way of calling me a bitch, Sarge.”

He gives her a withering look and pulls his hoodie and shirt over his head. Giving both herself and Steve, who is still rock hard against her thigh, a view of compact muscle shifting under scarred flesh. She runs a hand idly up Steve's arm, thicker and bulkier than Barnes, but no less appealing.

Barnes hesitates, until she reaches out and he stalks over to the bed, sitting, not laying down, but letting her take his hand. 

“I don't like the idea of infiltrating a hospital.” She says, her hand still tracing patterns against Steve's bicep. “I don't see how we can take him out later without risking running over our timeline though.”

Barnes looks at their hands, follows the trail of her arm to where she's laying with Steve still on top of her, like she's a road leading between them. It's a weirdly satisfying experience.

“I could get in.” Steve says just next to her ear, sounding like he needs a glass of cold water… or an equally frosty shower. “If I put on the suit. Say I'm there to see a patient.”

“It would be too obvious that you killed him.” Barnes says, and he scoots further onto the bed, leaning against the headboard and holding her hand in his lap, fingers massaging her palm. 

Jack makes a noise, half pleased with the attention she's getting and half speculative. “He doesn't have to kill him.” She says. “I'd rather do it myself anyway.” 

“And have you go feral in a hospital?” Barnes snorts. 

“He doesn't have to bleed. I don't mind slipping something into his IV drip and watching him go into anaphylaxis considering he's already pants shittingly afraid of me.” 

“It's a hospital. There's gonna be people bleeding all over the place.” 

“You could give me a hit first.”

“We don't even know if it works like that.”

“We don't know that it  _ doesn't _ , either, Sarge.”

Steve sighs loudly against her collarbone. “You're both ridiculous. I'll do it. I know you'd rather do it, sweetheart, but it's too dangerous.”

“I seem to remember you being about as stealthy as a bull in a china shop, pal.” Barnes says, and there's a smirk on his face that is a little less reserved than the man she's used to, a glimpse of the one Steve grew up with. Steve even has this hopeful look on his face, like he caught a glimpse of a shooting star.

“Can confirm.” She laughs, then gives a jaw, cracking yawn that makes both her bedmates frown. 

Barnes starts to get up, looking like he's going to go try to sleep on the couch but she huffs and pulls him back toward her. “It's a king sized bed. We all fit.” 

He sighs, kisses her palm, and then shucks off his jeans before settling in on her left. Steve takes a bit longer before he gets into a similar state of undress, requiring her grumbling further to get him to strip out of his clothes and tuck himself between the sheets to her right. 

They both seem frozen in place, avoiding touching each other and not quite touching her either. 

She flips so she's spooned against Steve, taking his arm and and throwing it over her waist, and then thumps her head against Barnes's shoulder and tosses her own arm across his chest. 

The light is turned off.

The blankets are pulled up so they cover her shoulder.

It's something.

* * *

 

Steve wakes curled around a slim body, legs tangled together, his face buried in hair, and the sensation of something heavy and metal resting on his hip.

He cracks an eye open and the sensation of excess limbs makes a little more sense. Three sets of legs, three sets of arms, all coiled around three bodies that have somehow rolled together in the middle of the bed despite the vast expanse of mattress on either side. 

He's got Edith pressed against him, facing Bucky, whose head is tucked under her chin, resting on her narrow bicep, arm sprawled across both her and Steve's waist. Her own arm is flung around Bucky's shoulder with a hand cradling the back of his head, and the one  _ she's _ using as a pillow has gone completely numb under her.

He's never been more comfortable.

He's never had to pee more in his entire life.

He tries to extricate himself as carefully as possible, shifts his legs and pulls his arm slowly out from under Edith's dead weight. 

A hand tightens on his waist, gripping gently, Steve glances down and sees a single steel-blue eye staring at him from the gap between Edith's throat and shoulder. 

“Sorry.” He whispers, then “Bathroom” by way of explanation. And the eye closes again, hand leaving his waist to snake up the side of Edith's body and bury itself under the band of her sports bra, splaying between her shoulders.

When Steve returns from the bathroom they're still like that, blue morning light leaving highlights across their bodies from the sliver of open curtain at the far side of the room. Scars cover the both of them, road maps of everything they've been through, metal limbs interrupting lines of flesh in a way that seems both cruel and beautiful. 

He creeps across the carpeted floor and back to his side of the bed, slipping under the duvet and trying not to move the bed too much. Edith, always the light sleeper, grumbles at the disturbance and then quiets once he's pressed against her back again. 

Bucky's arm detaches from Edith's back, and returns to Steve's waist.

A metal leg drags up Steve's calf and pulls it back into the warm tangle at the foot of the bed. 

Message received. He closes his eyes.

* * *

 

Barnes is used to having his sleep interrupted. Nightmares chew on his brain while he's unconscious, and he wakes with the urge to sweep the room for intruders, or bugs, or traps forcing him out of bed.

But now he comes to consciousness with the need to… stay in bed.

He's warm, and fed, and comfortable, and wrapped up in bronze arms and the subtle smell of orange and something newer. Cedar, he thinks. His head, instead of buzzing with anxiety, is calm. He knows he's next to two people, remembers going to bed with them the night before, remembers feeling a little strange about it at the time, even. 

But now? He's more comfortable than he can remember being in his entire life, and knows somehow that that statement extends to his life before the Soldier. Steve's waist supports his metal hand without complaint, his toes pressed against Barnes's shin, and his broad body blocking the morning light from hitting him directly in the eye. Jack is holding him against her chest and is sleep warm and soft, breathing against his hair in gentle puffs. 

Her hand tugs said hair lightly when he presses a kiss to the dip of her collarbone, and he knows better than to wake a sleeping bear. Reinforced when Steve makes a soft noise in his sleep and reaches across the bed, running a broad hand over Barnes' metal shoulder until it comes to rest across his forearm against Jack's ribs. 

Barnes fails to think of any reason he should get up.

So he doesn't.

* * *

 

Jack wakes up feeling like she's been asleep for an eon. She's disoriented, hot, sweaty, and buried under enough weight that she's genuinely surprised that she can still breathe. It's not  _ unpleasant _ , necessarily, but it might get there if she doesn't deal with it soon.

She's honestly just astounded that the pair of people surrounding her are somehow still asleep. Steve has always been a chirpy early riser, and Barnes is usually stalking the perimeter or gone completely by now. 

Jack, meanwhile, sleeps whenever she can, wherever she can, and usually in fits and starts. The last time she slept through the night was with chemical help. Mixing clonazepam with bourbon hadn't been one of her smarter ideas. She had slept for twenty seven hours and woken up in a dried puddle of drool with a head full of bees and her tongue feeling like she'd been sucking on cotton.

All things considered? This is better by a factor of at least ten. 

Until Steve's phone starts ringing to the tune of “Go Tell the Marines” and she snaps full awake with a groan, joined by Barnes's jolting out of bed like he's been shocked and Steve whining “Sorry!” As he rolls away and digs for his phone from somewhere near the side of the bed.

“Uggggh” she says in response, and rolls until she's face down and able to shove her head under a pillow.

The phone goes silent, and she feels a hand run up her back in apology. “It was Sam.”

“Tell him he's the worst.”

She thinks he laughs, but it's muffled through the pillow. She curls herself into a ball and tries to recapture that happy, drowsy feeling from less than a minute before, but it's useless. She's awake now.

“Okay, Buck?” Steve says, and it's a bit softer. She lifts her head, and Barnes is still looking like he's been woken by air raid sirens instead of the Andrews Sisters. 

“Come back to us, Sarge.” She hums, and he blinks, relaxing slightly. “I know it's obnoxious, but his last ringtone was  _ Boogie Woogie Bugle Boys _ .”

His shoulders drop finally “That's pretty fresh coming from the girl whose oh-five-hundred wake up was a song about getting high and having sex.” He says, deadpan.

“K. Flay is a national treasure.” She grumbles against the pillow. “Get back in bed.”

He obeys, not sliding all the way back to her, but close enough that his flesh hand can rest against the small of her back, still warm from her and Steve's body heat. 

“So, what's the plan?” Steve asks, on her other side, and she surprises herself by making a noncommittal noise.

“Case the hospital? The only other guy on the list is Strucker and he's sitting pretty inside a wasps nest, otherwise I'd say we should move on and circle back.” 

“He could go to ground.” Barnes says. “Steve's plan from last night is better.”

She hums her tentative agreement. She doesn't want Steve to have blood on his hands because of her, but Barnes has a point. It's the least risky option, even if it leaves the itch of withdrawal under her skin. 

She's actually feeling fairly normal this morning. Clear, she thinks, like she's made it to the eye of the hurricane and can take a moment to enjoy the absence of her compulsion. Her body feels a little tired, a bit sore, but she's not overheated and feeling like her head is in a fog, waiting for her next hit to jerk her into a hyperfocused euphoria. 

She kind of wishes they could just hole up here for a day and enjoy the fact that she's not in any immediate danger of turning into Hannibal Lecter. When she says as much they both look at her blankly.

“Silence of the Lambs?” She tries “Anthony Hopkins? Eats a guy's face?” 

Nothing. 

She sighs. “Day off it is.”

* * *

 

Watching movies was something of a favorite pastime for Steve, even before he and Edith started seeing each other. Pop culture had changed a lot in seventy years, and media made a good sign post for a lot of generational shifts. 

When he discovered that Edith was a bit of a movie buff, his education had been streamlined. They would spend at least one night a week curled up together and watching something from her personal collection of favourites, eating pizza from the best place in town, and consuming enough popcorn to buy stock in the stuff.

They didn't have popcorn here, and the pizza wasn't the greatest by anyone's standards, but the addition of a third and the fact that they're a little squished together to watch it on her phone's screen isn't a negative.

She's leaned back against his shoulder, her legs in Bucky's lap, and occasionally pointing out random trivia in between dialogue. Somewhere around the halfway point Steve feels an arm cover his own across the back of the padded headboard, and ends up adjusting so that he can gently stroke the back of a neck with his thumb.

When he glances over, he can see Bucky's eyes hooded, relaxed at the casual attention like a cat in a sunbeam. 

Edith notices, squeezes Steve's thigh with a lazy smile.

It's warm, and comfortable, and something he wishes he could keep forever. It's a snapshot of what they could have had if they were normal people, with normal lives. 

He pictures an apartment in Brooklyn, nineteen forty three, and Edith painting by the window in her bare feet and one of his old shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Her legs and forearms would always be covered in smears of brilliant colour when she painted. Bucky would be coming home after working the docks like he used to; tired and smelling like salt and coal fires with a fistful of money and a smile on his face. Steve could send his sketches to the local paper and put dinner on the table. At the end of the night they would fall into bed, tangled together like this and arguing about who's paying for the next date at the pictures. 

Simple. Perfect. Beautiful.

Impossible.

A hand cups his cheek and he leans into it. “You're scowling, Gorgeous. Where's your head?”

She says it quietly, and Bucky glances over but otherwise continues to focus on the movie. 

Steve smiles, taking her hand and kissing her knuckles gently. “Just daydreaming.”

She hums an acknowledgment, returning the gesture and keeping hold of his hand, letting their fingers rest In her lap, near where Bucky's metal fingers are tracing idly over her bare thighs. 

A sight that he shouldn't find erotic, but it makes his mouth go dry and his brain remind him that he hasn't had sex in two months.

His sex life with Edith after she had healed from the Triskelion incident had been  _ healthy _ , to say the least. So much so that after she had left he began to wonder just how he had managed to keep himself sane before they had met. Every mission, every long day spent managing Tony Stark's ego and Clint's sarcasm could be made less stressful by coming home and dragging Edith into the bedroom…

Or kitchen, or dining room… wherever there was a relatively flat surface really.

And then seeing her and Bucky last night? He was pretty sure he was having an aneurysm, though he knew that was impossible. 

He wasn't sure exactly how three people would come together like that. He had ideas, of course, because as much as the media liked to make him out to be some kind of symbol of American Values who would never have sex before marriage, Steve had eyes, and urges, and the benefit of an internet connection. 

“Must be some daydream.” Edith says, breaking him out of his train of thought. She's tilted her head up at him, smiling with a deviousness that reminds him that she's always been able to read him too well. Bucky's looking at him too, looking smug without being too obvious about it.

He realizes why when he looks down and realizes that his biology has, once again, betrayed him. 

“Sorry.” He says, but is silenced before he can say anything else by Edith's smiling kiss, pulling him to her with one arm, and at an awkward angle, but no less satisfying for it. She breaks away only to reach for Bucky and pull him in as well, rougher than she is with Steve, biting and gripping hard at his shoulder. 

When Bucky kisses Steve again, it's just as hungry. Intense and bruising in a way that makes his head spin, a hand pulling his hair the only thing keeping him from floating away. 

Edith's moan breaks them apart and when he looks down she's biting her lip and looking at them like they've just made her whole year. 

Things move much faster after that.

What few articles of clothing they still have on are stripped off and flung into all corners of the room, and Bucky ends up with a lap-full of squirming Edith as Steve lets himself drown in the feeling of Bucky's tongue in his mouth, licking over his teeth with his metal hand gripping the back of Steve's skull in a way that he thinks should make him threatened but instead just sends a frisson of heat through him. 

Steve's hands bracket the other two, one hand supporting him against the headboard, the other sliding over Edith's scarred back as she arches, grinding down against Bucky's fingers as they curl inside her. Steve can see his thumb stroking circles over the apex of her sex, and the shine of slick against his palm. Steve can also see the dusky curve of Bucky's cock where it juts out just above her, thick and leaking precome against his stomach.

It takes a moment before he gives into the urge and strokes over it with gentle fingers, making Bucky hum his approval. 

It's different from Steve's own. Darker, shorter but thicker, and uncut. Steve has to take a moment to figure out how to work him over, and quickly discovers that the tight push and pull of foreskin over Bucky's cockhead makes his head fall back with a moan.

“Have I ever told you how much I love that you're such a fast learner?” Edith says, turning her head so she can kiss him while he let's Bucky rut into his hand. 

“You might have. Having a hard time remembering right now.” He nips at her lower lip, and feels his own, neglected, erection brush against the small of her back, then the swell of her ass. Her hips are bruised, fingerprints from another set of hands splayed across them, one of which is currently curled around his wrist against the headboard.

Bucky's hips keep jerking up every time Steve strokes over him, pushing Edith back against Steve's chest. His lips are kiss swollen and he bites the lower as he slips through Steve's fingers, breath hissing through his teeth, and then stilling and grabbing Steve's hand with the one that had been wrapped around his wrist.

“Wait!” He says, and everyone stills, “I'm too close. You two are a couple of goddamn monsters.”

Edith let's out a breath, sagging against Steve. “You made me think I'd hurt you, jackass.” 

“No. Stevie just hurt my ego. Figures I'd be ready to pop two minutes into a handy.” He's smiling now, flushed across the bridge of the nose and down his neck. “Just… let me return the favor?”

Steve muffles a groan against Edith's shoulder. Even the idea is enough to make him twitch. 

His idea isn't even close to the real thing.

Edith climbs off Bucky's lap, and Steve crawls over, drawn like a magnet to his mouth and those hungry, desperate kisses that leave him uncharacteristically breathless. Bucky's flesh hand wraps around Steve's cock and he moans into the other man's mouth. 

His hand is cloyingly warm, and Steve feels how wet it is from toying with Edith's cunt and it nearly sends him tumbling into an orgasm without preamble. He manages to hold back, barely, and runs his unsteady fingers over Bucky's broad chest letting his nail scrape over a hard nipple and listening to the answering growl that rumbles out of him.

“Move your hand.” Edith says, her voice stormy, and Bucky does as he's told, reluctantly releasing Steve's cock. When Steve looks again her long fingers are wrapping around the both of them, both hands just enough to circle the two of them in a tight grip that makes Steve's hips thrust forward without meaning to.

Oh.

_ Oh _ .

Their cocks are pressed together, slick with precome and Edith's desire, and when Steve thrusts it drags them against each other in a way that is completely and utterly exquisite. 

If the noise Bucky makes is any indication, he feels the same way.

They both fuck into her grip, Bucky panting and Steve making making desperate whining sounds as they chase each other's rhythm. Edith encourages them, murmuring how good they look and how much she loves feeling them together in a way that kicks away any remaining doubts about this entire thing and sends them both crashing into a filthy kiss and a shuddering, screaming orgasm. 

Edith releases them slowly fingers coming away covered in too much cum. She licks it off like it's the best thing she's ever tasted and Steve feels light headed. 

He has enough energy to pull her legs over his shoulders and bury his tongue in her though, tasting the musky saltiness he's come to love, sealing his lips over her clit and sucking and listening to her sob out a moan just as Bucky echoes the motion with her mouth, swallowing her words.

She curses  _ a lot _ when Steve does this.

And if he hadn't just emptied himself all over Bucky's stomach he would absolutely be turned on again, the taste and the way she squeezes silky around his tongue and the complete and utter smut that comes out of her mouth as every word is licked away by Bucky's attentions.

Steve curls a finger inside her just so, and she arches off the bed, nails scoring his scalp, and he feels her walls clamp down around his fingers like a vice as she falls over the edge.

They all collapse together after that, Steve's head resting on her belly, Bucky running his fingers through Steve's hair while he pillows his own head on her chest. 

Edith makes a happy, satisfied noise. Relaxing against the mattress and looking entirely pleased with the fact that she's holding the both of them.

A few moments pass in silence, heavy breathing and the rattle of traffic the only noise in the room. Steve lets his mind wander aimlessly, cataloguing the sensation of blunt nails against his scalp and the simmering heat pouring off Edith's body. 

She makes a thoughtful sound, and when Steve glances at her face her eyes are still lidded, but she has that shallow furrow between her brows that she gets when she's considering something.

"I think…" she says slowly "I know how to get to Clark."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments fuel the writing machine and are loved with the intensity of 1000000 Carol Danvers plasma punches.


	8. Killbox

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for suicidal ideation, and smut, and various things that go with that. Mind your triggers.

October, 2012

 

The hum of crickets seems louder at sunset, the birds going quiet as the light turns golden rose through the treeline. Grandad is bundled in a grey sweater and fiddling with his pipe when Edith steps onto the porch, wielding her own cigarette and offering him her lighter silently.

She sits next to him on that high-backed bench that's lived at this house longer than she can remember. The wood has gone silver with age and there's a huge, splintered, gouge in one of the arms from when Edith herself had been a frustrated teenager with a pocket knife and too much free time. It's filled with cigarette butts now, her most recent contribution. 

Smoke swirls in the cool autumn air between them, pot scented and quiet. They've never felt the need to fill silences with each other, and she feels her heart twitch uncomfortably when she thinks about how much she'll miss this. 

He passes her the pipe, she passes him the cigarette, and she takes a long drag while she shoves the thought back into its box, letting the calming musk of pot smoke soak into her lungs. 

"You haven't been talking to that boy as much." Grandad says, and she sighs.

"He's busy. The cell connection our here is crap."

Grandad grunts his understanding, but continues anyway "Back when I was your age we managed just fine without cellphones." He says, trading the cigarette for the pipe again. "We wrote letters. Your Grandma still has some of mine."

Grandma had been dead for ten years, but Edith doesn't see the need to point this out. Granddad's brain gets lost in time a lot these days, and unless he's upset she lets him reminisce. 

"Tell me about him again?"

She smiles at that, staring out into the little garden through the veil of smoke.

"He's a veteran, like us, and a gentleman, like you Grandad." He laughs at that, patting her hand, and she continues. "He's very sweet, and smarter than he gives himself credit for. Handsome, obviously… He's white, though."

"Damn colonizers."

They're both laughing then, making the bench shake and the smoke jitter in the cool autumn air. The sunlight dapples through the trees, rose gold and beautiful, and Edith remembers it later as the perfect ending of her Grandad's last good day.

* * *

 

 

April,  2015

 

It says something about Jack, and how much her standards have changed since Kandahar, that she's legitimately surprised when her plan goes off without a hitch.

She stays in the car, phone hooked into her crappy little laptop to give it enough signal to access the hospital's security. Jarvis' clever little subroutines are able to keep cameras from picking up Steve and Barnes, setting video to loop wherever necessary, and she's even able to shutter the power in parts of the hospital and throw a fire alarm to cover their escape after the deed is done.

On paper, Clark dies of cardiac failure. But Jack doesn't care what the official report says, Clark is dead, Jack made it happen, and she has one last name on her list before she can ride off into the sunset.

She's still contemplating how she'll achieve that sunset, now that it's in reach. She's not particularly concerned with leaving a pretty corpse, doesn't want to give anyone an excuse to embalm her and stick her in a box in the ground. No, she'd rather someone just drop her in a hole and let the worms have her. Poison won't work on her anymore, and jumping off something tall enough to kill her just seems overdramatic. Jack could go the classic route and take a bullet to the brain, but that could be  _ slightly _ traumatic for anyone who finds her.

Her biggest fear about the whole thing is the statistics. Most attempted suicides end with people just injuring themselves horribly and spending the rest of their lives being fed through a tube and wearing a diaper, which is sort of the opposite of the whole "eternal rest" thing she's aiming for. There's also no guarantee that kind of injury would curb her violent appetites, which is the entire point of this whole depressing-as-hell enterprise.

Funny that she's spent nearly her entire adult life focused on killing other people, but when it comes to killing herself she's low on ideas. The only concrete part of the entire plan is that she needs to do it before she can't anymore, and given that she doesn't know exactly when that will be...

Anyway, it's moot until she deals with Strucker, and  _ that _ is a death she has plenty ideas about. 

Steve and Barnes climb back into the car twenty minutes after they've left. Steve looking bone-tired as he leans back heavily in the passenger seat. Barnes gives her a look through the rear-view mirror, one she recognizes from their hunts as a need to talk, and she dips her chin just enough to nod before she squeezes Steve's knee gently and starts up the car. 

She expected him to take this hard. Steve may have been a soldier, but he was no fan of violence. "Jack" was the name of the box she kept her trauma in, how she kept herself sane after years of nothing but violence. She didn't have Nazis, Hydra, or any other easily described "bad guy" to assuage her guilt or allow her to make excuses about doing the right thing. Jack followed orders, and Jack made her peace with the fact that life was never going to be the black and white dichotomy everyone wished it was. Steve… he was still learning.

If she ended up in his black books, maybe that was for the best.

* * *

 

 

Steve falls asleep around three in the morning  just after they've crossed the Lithuanian border, and Jack pulls them over down a dark, gravel, side road where there's no sound but the chatter of insects. 

Barnes follows her as she leaves the car, walking only a few meters away, close enough to be seen by the amber glow of her cigarette if Steve wakes. The man sleeps like the dead, though. It was another change he'd had to get used to after Steve showed up in Germany, post-serum and no longer suffering from the persistent sleep apnea that would wake him every few hours. Now,  he just mumbles something drowsily when Jack's door closes with a quiet clunk of metal on metal, and doesn't even shift when Barnes follows suit. 

The gravel crunches softly beneath their shoes, and Jack walks them off the shoulder and into the damp grass, navigating by moonlight until she finds a spot she seems to find acceptable. She flicks the ashes of her cigarette, and he can only see her jaw flex because he's standing so close. 

"Steve served… forty-three to forty-five?" She asks quietly. 

"As far as I can remember, yeah." It's fuzzy, but the more time he spends with him the more seems to come back in flashes and impressions. The smell of dust burning on a radiator, heavy wool blankets, smooth bars of lye soap under a freezing cold shower, the stillness of camp after curfew. 

"And then he's fighting with the Avengers from… twenty twelve to now, so all in all that's… six years? Seven?"

Barnes nods, silent, watching her calculate something in her head. 

"I was in the forces from the time I was eighteen." She says "Still a teenager, really, they say your brain doesn't finish developing until you're twenty five. I got used to violence early, figured out how to separate what I was doing and what I was feeling. I don't think people can survive doing the stuff I did without compartmentalizing."

Barnes nods again, "That's why you're Jack?" He tries "And before, you were… Edith?"

She makes a noise to the affirmative, exhaling a swirl of silvery blue from her nose. "Steve knows Edith. We met in an art class, dated like normal people for awhile, and even when he showed up at my door after SHIELD went south it was all very… I wasn't killing the same way I killed during the war. It was calculated, sure, but it was survival. I was killing to keep myself safe, to keep Steve safe." 

"You, though…" she looks at him then, eyes shining faintly bronze "You met Jack first. All my hard edges. The people we've killed together? It stopped being survival the second Caine told me there wasn't a cure."

The first time he'd watched her work it had been a revelation. Violence put to work for a purpose. No orders handed down from men in suits, just an angry woman ridding the world of people who toyed with human lives and treated them like science experiments. The savagery she invoked to pull information from them was terrible in its precision, and Barnes saw it as a kind of poetic justice that a woman they'd had a hand in creating could use what they'd done to her to so thoroughly destroy them. 

Later, he could look back and see the desperation there too. 

"Steve won't kill me, if it comes to it. He still sees Edith when he looks at me, still assumes we'll go home and argue about what color we want to paint the kitchen and nag each other about our tastes in music… and he can have that with someone, just… not me." She looks at Barnes meaningfully. 

"You said yourself that we're a couple of "broken white boys"" He says, and she laughs, a flash of teeth in the dark. It makes him want to reach for her and kiss her, feel that smile with his own, but casual affection is still a new thing for him. "None of us were ever exactly meant for normal. Even Steve. I'm not the same person he remembers any more than you are."

"You're also not dying."

"True." He says "And I'm not saying I don't want to try. I have all these old memories, feelings that make no sense until he's there and then I just…" 

Jack watches him shrug when he's unable to find the right words. He's complained about the disordered return of his memories before, many of them sensory, unable to put together faces in his mind's eye. It's frustrating in a way he can't describe with any accuracy. Like looking at things through a blurry scope that he can't adjust and having to guess at his target. 

She lifts a hand, gripping the seam of his shoulder gently where it connects to the metal of his arm. "I need to know that what you said before, about killing me if I can't come back… I need to know you'll do it." 

Her face is only barely discernible in the darkness, the faint light bouncing off high cheekbones and the bow of her lip. He can see the tension there nonetheless, the furrow between her eyebrows and the line of her jaw. 

He nods, and pulls her against him. Stashes the hurt somewhere with Bucky to examine later, and kisses her with more care than he ever has. Holding her face between his mismatched hands and pressing his lips softly to hers.

"Anything for you, doll."

* * *

 

May, 2015

 

"Huh."

The note rings out over the otherwise silent connection, causing Steve to lower his binoculars and readjust them to check on Edith's position. She's practically invisible where she's shimmied herself up a tree further up the ridge, only visible because he knows what to look for. 

"Something interesting?" 

"Yeah." She replies, "Notice how there aren't any birds on the central building?"

He pans over to the part of the fortress she's referring to, high up on the hillside. The place is heavily occupied, with vehicles and militia moving about like ants on a dirt mound. There were crows and other native birds he couldn't identify flying around the structure and landing on parts of it, but curiously avoiding the central block. 

"What are you thinking?" 

"Not thinking yet. Just observing." 

Steve watched the birds for a few more seconds, switching back to checking over the doors and windows visible from his vantage point.

"Observe quieter, Jack. You've got a patrol coming on your nine." Bucky says, and Steve shifts again to watch the white-clad guards pass beneath her without bothering to even look up. His heart is still in his throat until she taps the all-clear into her com though.

A few minutes later and she speaks again: "I have a theory… and maybe a plan." 

"Let's hear it."

"Force fields. It sounds ridiculous but… if Strucker got a hold of that thing from New York? The scepter? It would be enough to power something that big."

"We've been looking for that thing forever. If you're right I'm gonna have to bring in the team." Thor in particular would need to be told that his brother's scepter had been found. Steve wasn't keen on messing around with any more alien technology.

"If I'm right then we're not just gonna be able to drop a bunker buster on them and hope for the best. Someone will have to go in, disarm the generator, and essentially lower the drawbridge for the main force." 

Steve knows the team can be in Sokovia in twelve hours, but with Bucky an unknown quantity to the rest of the team, and Edith on the edge of her control he's extremely aware of how much could go wrong. 

He trusts his team though. Likes to think they trust him too, even if they poke and test at his decisions every time he makes one. 

Edith does it too, to everyone, and less gently. Taking an idea and examining it like a piece of machinery, trying to see where all the parts work. Her head for tactics has always been something he's found bizarrely attractive. 

Bucky must agree because the next thing he says is "Don't talk dirty over the coms." And its followed by her throaty laughter. 

* * *

 

Jarvis confirms her theory about the scepter as soon as she plugs him into the laptop. An energy field matching the scepter is being generated from inside the fortress and powering an extra layer of protection for whatever Strucker has hiding inside. 

If only someone had experience infiltrating heavily fortified enemy compounds and trashing their shit…

Jack practically cackles at the blueprint as she takes a sharpie to it and finds the fastest route to the generator. The scepter is harder, likely movable throughout the main block, but once the barrier is down the rest of the team can drop in and clear the base from the bottom up. 

The whole thing is keenly nostalgic. This was something she'd done hundreds of times, surrounded by Recon jarheads and miles of sand in every direction. She'd fished viable plans of attack out of impossible odds and taken down bunkers and fortresses and even an entire town with the enthusiasm exclusive to the type of woman who had played far too many strategy games in her youth. 

"You might be scarier like this than when you're feral." Barnes says, and she just flicks a pencil at him. Steve, at least, knows how best to operate his team and is able to offer some insight on that front. She's only ever worked with Sam, Natasha, and Clint, and not closely enough to parse out more than their basic strengths and weaknesses on the battlefield. 

Soon, the plan is fully formed, with Thor and the Hulk acting as their bunker busters, Sam and Tony on air support, and Nat and Clint joining Steve in the final sweep. Barnes and herself will be going in together to trash the generator, a portion of the plan Steve chose to bitch about until she pointed out that she needed him on backup in case shit hit the fan. She's worked with Barnes in this capacity longer than she's worked with Steve, she knows his strengths and weaknesses about as well as she knows her own and can compensate for them, while Steve has kept her sniping or running electronic sabotage at a distance since the Triskelion.

She hums her satisfaction when she's completed her marking of the map, taping it to the wall above the desk like a child's drawing on a refrigerator and stepping back into Steve's waiting arms. He kisses her shoulder where the neck of her shirt drapes too wide, one of his large hands slipping beneath the fabric at her waist.

"We should sleep before the team gets here." He says.

She makes a considering noise. "Should." She hums, feeling him press another kiss higher, to the side of her neck. "Probably won't."

"She's a bad influence." Barnes adds from his perch behind them. 

"The worst." Steve agrees, and she laughs, turning around and shoving him back and getting pulled into a thorough kiss as a result. Bucky yanks them both down onto the bed next to him and grins at Steve's surprised yelp. 

"I was feeling lonely." He says and Steve pulls him down as well, slow and hungry. 

She watches, rapt, the slide of their lips and press of tongues makes the blood in her veins simmer with appreciation. Pale fingers tangling in dark hair, a silver hand gripping at Steve's shirt by the collar. She can feel both of them pressed against her, Steve beneath her hips and Barnes against her ribs. It's better than porn, better than drugs. They look so right together she wishes she had the time to paint it. 

They'd both hate that, she thinks. 

She kisses the hollow of Barnes's throat, smiling at the involuntary shiver he rewards her with, and let's the sharp edges of her nails trail up and over his stomach without scratching. Steve echoes the motion against her back, holding her closer with the flat of his hand splayed between her shoulders. They're both so warm, everywhere she touches they seem to radiate an effervescent heat that soothes through her like good whiskey. She wishes she could bottle the sensation, the feeling of safety and happiness and home that curls low in her belly. 

Barnes bites her lip gently, soothes it with a slow pass of his tongue, and then kisses her in a way she's not used to with him. Still hungry, but soft and almost careful after the initial press of teeth. More like how he had kissed Steve. Jack sighs into it, letting herself be moved until she's between him and Steve, with the metal of her leg hooked over Barnes's hip as he presses against her, pushing her back into Steve, who takes it upon himself to move the tail of her braid away from her neck so he can continue where he'd left off. 

Before long, she's losing track of hands, a pair cupping her breasts, another finding its way into her tights and between her thighs. A fourth, metal and therefore likely belonging to Barnes, is kneading the flesh of her ass. Her own fingers are clutching desperately at fabric as she groans against Barnes's mouth. Steve is rutting against her backside, kissing the line of her pulse until she feels herself shuddering between them, close enough to feel that low, hot, throb of a building orgasm begin to rise. 

She cums with a string of moaned curses, earning her a bite from Steve that does nothing but make her writhe more on the fingers working her open. Barnes's hand pushes her tights down and peels them from her legs, and she clumsily helps him escape from his own boxers, hooking her toes into the waistband and pushing down. Steve is, apparently, already on the same page.

There's some movement, some adjusting for the angle of their bodies and the position of limbs, and she feels Steve press into her from behind, groaning into her hair. 

She's pressed flush against Barnes, wrapped around his body as Steve slowly pushes into her, deeper, until his hips meet the curve of her ass and she shivers. Barnes's own erection is pressed against her clit, and when he rocks forward she whimpers at the jolt of heat that fizzes through her whole body. He kisses her again when Steve thrusts into her, swallowing the desperate noise even as Steve moans against her shoulder. When he does it again, she feels her hips move up, and the head of Barnes's cock angles in such a way that he very nearly ends up inside her alongside Steve.

The idea takes form in her mind and she immediately feels a surge of want. She wants to feel both these men filling her, wants the heavy stretch, the sensation of them sliding against each other inside her like they had been between her palms days ago. 

"I can take it." She says, voice ragged with lust. "I want both of you. Please." 

"Jesus, Jack." He says it against her mouth, and Steve's answering whine tells her everything she needs to know.

The stretch is incredible, almost painful, but so, so good. She feels so full and heavy that she can barely breathe from the intensity, feeling her insides twitch and squeeze involuntarily around the new sensation. 

Steve curses softly and she barely has the breath to laugh, feeling the puff of breath skim her ear.

Neither of them move until she does, adjusting to the sensation and then it's a slow, careful, thing that scatters her thoughts until the almost tidal rhythms of their thrusting is the only thing she can focus on. Steve presses in, dragging between her and Barnes as the other man pulls away, then in perfect countermeasure they switch, with Barnes burying his cock as deep as he can while Steve gives him the room to fill her. 

She's sweating, practically sobbing in pleasure, and she thinks she might die here, happily between the men she loves. Steve and Barnes kiss wantonly over her shoulder, panting against each other as they begin to work into her harder, burning her alive with how amazing they both feel until the heat reaches some apex within her that boils through her blood and sends her spiralling into bliss. 

It doesn't take them long, her cum slicking them within her and allowing them to move easily, desperately, until she hears first Steve and then Barnes's twin sounds of completion.

Something about the idea of their spend mingling inside her body makes her feel pleasantly lightheaded. 

Steve's thick arm wraps around them both, broad fingers stroking over Barnes's bicep as he buries his nose in Jacks hair.

"If you fall asleep." Barnes grumbles, voice hoarse "and I have to clean up the mess we just made… I will smother you."

Jack snuffles a laugh. "The mess is inside me, Sarge. It won't be a problem until one of you pulls out."

"I suppose we can always just stay like this."

"Might be hard to explain to the team." She smiles at Steve's annoyed grunt, the only response he manages until she wiggles just enough to elicit a drowsy sound of annoyance.

She lets him rest, and Barnes doesn't actually complain when he's the one who crawls out of bed to obtain towels and a glass of water. Jack wriggles onto the soft cotton, saving the hotel sheets from the mess, and then pulls him back into place, kissing him softly.

She sees his promise, when he looks at her then, and wishes they had more time. The clock is ticking down and this new, beautiful, thing between the three of them is already so full of things she's never allowed herself to want. She doesn't want to let go, doesn't want to lose this strange, wonderful love. 

And she does love him. Barnes. As much as she loves Steve even, which she thinks must be some kind of transgression. But she's always known Steve's feelings for his best friend, even if he never said them out loud. The affection was plain on his beautiful face whenever the man's name came up.

When she's dead, and the monster inside her is no longer hanging above their heads like a guillotine waiting to drop, they'll still have each other.

And that, she thinks, is the most she should dare to ask for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two more chapters. I'm just editing them at this point. Let's bag this rabbit.


	9. Semper Fidelis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mind your triggers for graphic tourture and some body horror.

February, 2009

 

After their first kill, Jack shaves a star into the side of her team member's crewcuts. 

It's not technically kosher with the brass, but this far out in the desert she gets away with whatever gets the job done. Little morale boosts like this one fit her definition of necessary, especially knowing how fucked up that first taste of death can be for some of the newer marines.

Her squad generally only brings in specialists with a bit of a history. Almost none of them are "murder virgins" as Wilson likes to call them, but every once in a while she ends up with a girl like Freeman whose fresh from civvies but has an engineering degree and the ability to hit a moving target at range. Jack boards them on softer missions first, gives them an easy kill that isn't too up close or too messy or too… around the rest of the team. When they're done she gives them a pat on the shoulder, a shot of contraband bourbon, and shaves a star into the side of their head. 

"I didn't think it would feel like that." The younger woman says as Jack works with the standard-issue razor along the side of her dark scalp.

"Like what?"

"So… permanent."

"It's death. Death is pretty permanent." 

Freeman frowns. "I think I mean more that I feel different now. Like I've done something I can't take back."

Jack makes a noise. Half sympathy, half agreement. She's tried not to be quite so philosophical about the whole thing since she's started leading the team, that way lies nightmares and she already sleeps like shit.

"You'll do it again. And it will lose some of that. You become desensitized after awhile, or you get out, or you get shot… most of these guys want us dead on principle." The edge of the star is smooth, a crisp line against her temple, and Jack tosses the razor into the sharps bin once she's satisfied it's even. "And lo, arise a knight Sir Freeman." She says with a small flourish, and holds up the hand mirror to reveal her work.

Freeman smiles, and Jack puts her thoughts of death aside to present her newest team member to her peers. 

* * *

 

May, 2015

 

Steve explains the plan because everyone in the room trusts him. Bucky and Edith are complete and relative unknowns, respectively, and though everyone is aware that Edie is probably the best tactician among them Steve knows that they'll be more receptive of the whole thing if he's the one to explain it.

Or that's what Edie tells him when he tries to delegate the job to her. 

They end up meeting east of the fortress, the quinjet landing in a strip of unoccupied field that he has to take their crappy sedan off-road to reach. When they finally pull up to the winged gray mass they find the engines off and the ramp already down. Sam is the first to greet him, with a one-armed hug and a shaking of his head.

"So we bust our asses looking for him for over a year, and she finds him in under a month?"

Steve laughs, patting him on the back, "Yeah, well…"

Edie says something about not making her sit with a com buoy strapped to her ass next time they have to hunt someone down and then trails off. Bucky frowns and grips her shoulder, following Steve up the ramp and into the belly of the aircraft. 

Natasha greets Edith with a significant look that Steve can't decipher, and isn't sure he wants to when Edie looks like she's going to swallow her own tongue. The redhead usually knows way more than she lets on, and Steve doesn't doubt she's been keeping tabs on things since he left the tower. 

The whole plan is explained in five minutes, including questions (from Sam, Clint, and Bruce), and Sarcastic notes (from Tony). Thor seems pleased with his instructions to do as much damage as possible, and with the fact that Loki's scepter is finally close at hand. 

"When the barrier drops you can all start moving in on the fortress itself. But until then our priority is drawing out Strucker's forces to give Edith and Bucky a clear shot at that generator." 

"Clear-ish" Edith says. "I plan on putting Strucker's head on a platter before we're done. I figure he's the type to send his troops out and stay in his hidey hole with a few bodyguards."

"Is that a problem?" It's Sam who asks.

Steve can see the vicious glint in her eye when she grins then, a glimmer of that violence that's slowly taking her from him. He wants nothing more in that moment than to find a way to keep her away from what will inevitably send her spiralling back into that mind consuming bloodlust.

"No problem at all." She says.

* * *

 

The coms buzz with enough voices that it takes Barnes time to adjust. The rest of Steve's team has hijacked a Jeep and a motorcycle, and are busting their way up the north side of the perimeter while he and Jack work their way from the east on foot, keeping out of visual range from any of the watchtowers. 

Jack's armor is heavy on her slim frame, making her appear bulky around the chest and shoulders. She's replaced her found arsenal of guns and knives with ones built by Howard Stark's son, Tony. They're sleek and made with her height and fighting style in mind, and surprisingly lightweight when he asks to inspect the sniper rifle (which she's inexplicably named "Bianca" and which has a conspicuous lip-print on the stock). 

He's been given weapons as well, and a set of kevlar body armor that covers him from neck to toe. He ends up removing the suit's left arm, allowing the metal easier movement. The guns he's given are heavier, built for someone his size.

It's strange to be in the field again of his own free will. His orders coming from the woman beside him and a man who cares if he gets injured. He knows that he'll remember this when it's over, too, as more than just a vague impression of mission details and painful sense-memory. There will be no memory wipes or long naps on ice when he's done, he won't come to consciousness shivering and nauseous and disoriented like every mission before.

They wait for Sam, the Falcon, to take out one of the watchtowers, while Tony takes out another with his Iron Man suit. It's a bizarre thing to watch, these men literally flying through the air using technology that he never could have dreamed of in the forties. He used to consider himself a bit of a technophile, but Stark's work is way out of his league.

Watching Jack take aim at the single remaining guard on the wall nearest to them with her rifle and exhale completely before firing a perfect headshot is much more familiar, down to the methodical discharge of the shell and scope check afterwards.

"East side clear." She says into the com, and he only catches the self-satisfied smile because he's looking directly at her. That, too, is familiar. He remembers wearing one just like it while watching Steve's back.

"North side is very busy!" Comes Natasha's reply.

"Good. We're moving"

They approach the barrier wall at a jog, the fortress looming above them. He tosses a stick at the wall to check if the force-field extends this far, but it hits nothing but stone and earns him a raised eyebrow.

"Can't be too careful, sweetheart."

She huffs, reaching for the grappling hook strapped to her belt and firing it up at the wall, yanking it hard until it finds purchase. They both crawl up until they land on top of the wall, and crouch down behind the medieval crenulations, scanning for other guards.

They spot none, but can hear the sounds of moving vehicles and people nearby, accompanied by the distant gunfire sounding from the North. None of it is close enough to be a problem, so they continue on to the rear of the fortress, and the center block.

"Okay, where's your stick now?" Jack mumbles as they move quietly a few meters away from the wall. There are voices a bit closer now, and a smell in the air like ozone. 

He picks up a loose pebble from the stone rooftop beneath his feet and tosses it.

There's a crackling sound, and a dull hum as the rock explodes on impact. The ozone smell gets briefly stronger and part of the barrier seems to glow blue and ripple slightly in place, expanding outward before fading back into invisibility.

"Well… Shit." Jack says. 

"Language." Steve responds and the ribbing from his teammates is instantaneous. Tony and Sam cackling mercilessly.

"What are we shitting about exactly?" Clint asks, once the chatter has died down.

"Forcefield is a bit scarier than expected. We'll figure it out."

Barnes follows her around the northeastern wall, until they spot a door on the level below. There's no indication of a guard presence, which could be because of the siege, or because there's a barrier in place.

Jack drops a flat flake of stone into his hand. The angle is off, though, and when he throws it the rippling glow doesn't quite reach the archway to tell them if it's covered or not. 

"We could shoot it?" He offers, and she shrugs, lifting her pistol and stepping around him for a better angle. 

She lowers it after a second, frowning. "We'll give away our position. It's responding like ripples in a pond, the more kinetic force hits it the bigger the glow." 

"So what do we do?"

"Get down there and find another rock. Hope nobody sees us." She sighs.

They are, of course, not that fortunate. Three troopers in heavy armor are directly in line of sight from the door, and immediately start calling for backup and firing their weapons. He manages to duck behind a stone pillar, and Jack dives and rolls behind a stack of metal I-beams with an irritated growl that he can just barely hear above the gunshots. 

He takes two out, peeking out of his cover and shooting one through the throat and the other in the chest. Jack takes out the third by shooting out his leg when he rushes her position, before grabbing him by the armored vest and tossing him at the doorway. When the barrier doesn't fry him, she shoots him in the back of the skull. 

"And there's our answer." She hums, then tugs on the door handle, making it squeak. It remains closed though. "I was hoping to save the explosives for the generator."

Barnes brushes her aside and grips the seam of the door with his mechanical hand, jerking once and making the steel buckle between his fingers before tearing the whole thing off its hinges. 

"Mom always said it was polite to open doors for a lady." 

She snorts, grinning at him with that predatory, cheshire cat smile. She does a quick spot check of the room the door opens into before pulling him down for a kiss that's all teeth and hunger. So fast he barely gets a chance to respond, she just keeps grinning and takes off into the belly of the fortress without a word.

* * *

 

For the amount of energy output Jarvis picked up when he'd examined the place, Hydra doesn't seem to have wanted to spare any to keep the fortress lit. The hallway she makes her way down is dim, and it's a miracle she can see anything at all. 

She clears rooms methodically, pistol ready for any unfortunate occupants, but finds this level mostly empty but for the remains of people's abandoned work piled onto steel-framed desks. She pauses her advance only when Steve informs them that there's an enhanced on the field.

"He got Clint?"

"Clipped him. Thor's on evac." He replies and she taps the com to copy, quickening her pace.

The hall ends at a stairwell, and she listens to the echoing footsteps moving toward the door, and signals Barnes.

She takes a note from his book, kicking the door off its hinges and slamming it into the passing victim. The smell of blood is instant, and thick in the confined space, and she has to shake herself to get reoriented while Barnes tosses the door to the side to reveal the man underneath.

The impact broke his arm, probably dislocated it, and his leg isn't looking too good either, judging by its inability to support his weight when he tries to stand, but Strucker is otherwise alive, and staring straight at her like she's his own personal boogie-man.

"Good morning, Baron." She says, feeling the rush of anticipation flooding her senses. 

"Jackal." He says, voice only just steady enough to not betray him. "I know when I'm beaten. I promise to cooperate in exchange for a good word with the World Security Council."

She laughs then, and hauls him up by the collar. "Is that where you think you're going?" She sniffs, dragging him with her down the stairs and letting his shouts of pain stoke her appetite. First the generator, then she'll take her time with him. Celebrate a job well done by bleeding him dry, or cutting out his eyes and feeding them to him.

Barnes, ever-silent at her back, follows them until they reach what must be the basement. A cavernous laboratory with alien tech scattered throughout, including a massive chitauri worm suspended from the ceiling. 

But what she's looking for? That's further ahead, the generator and scepter are twin blue glows in the center of the room, surrounded by cables and metal cages. 

"We've got eyes on the scepter." She says, "It's in a containment unit of some kind."

"Any word on that barrier?" 

Barnes walks over to the generator, looks between the scepter's mount and the generator, and yanks a mass of wires laying between them until they snap and spark against his hand. There's a low hum of systems powering down and flicking off, and the generator chugging to a stop.

Jack raises an eyebrow, and he just shrugs and says "Drawbridge is down." 

"On our way."

"Take your time." She replies, and then looks around the room for what supplies she needs. 

The office chair looks comfortable, and expensive, but it should serve her purpose for now. She forces Strucker to sit, not a difficult task with his leg as messed up as it is. She hadn't been sure if it was broken before, but now she's fairly certain it's at least fractured. 

Loose cables act as makeshift rope, binding his wrists to the chair's arms and his shoulders back against the leather cushioning. 

His teeth are grit in pain, but he doesn't make a sound other than the hiss of his heavy breathing.

"So." She says, removing her gloves methodically. "You've been experimenting with the meta gene?"

He says nothing. 

"I've been experimenting myself." She continues. "See, Caine told me that the best way to get the gene to express itself in people who have it is to put the body under extreme stress. Krieger and Weber agreed, actually, they based their entire body of work on it." Jack tucks the gloves away in her belt, fingers flexing. Her nails have gotten longer, thicker, since this all began, and she's started filing them into blunt points. It had been a whim, at first, but now she likes the idea of having a set of claws. 

"I don't negotiate with animals." Strucker hisses.

"This isn't a negotiation." She uses the pointed end of her thumb to feel up his forearm until she finds the break. A crooked divot in his ulna that her binding and the chair's arm is, ironically, splinting. 

When she digs into it he screams a curse at her, thrashing as much as the makeshift rope will allow. 

"Most of my questions about what's happening to me have already been answered. My questions for you are about the enhanced you dropped on the field before, and about any other Weapon Plus experiments you might have found yourself involved in." Jack releases him, her thumb coming up slick with fragrant, berry-red blood. She suppresses the urge to lick it clean, but her leash on her control is already much tighter than it would have been a month, or even a week ago. She's keyed up, too warm beneath her armor, and the smell of fear is flavoring the very air she breathes. 

"Weapon Plus died with Hydra."

She snorts, "I have the last words of several of your colleagues to prove otherwise. They all seemed to think you were the last holdout… and that you were still loyal to Hydra." 

"An exaggeration." He grunts, and she sighs, impatient, turning around to salvage some control. Barnes is wandering around the lab examining it's contents, and has paused in front of a large, oblong casket of some sort, made of steel and marked with a series of Russian words she can't decipher. She admires him for an moment, broad shoulders and dark hair he still refuses to tie back. The body armor obscures the narrow vee of his waist but she can picture it clearly. His steel-blue eyes catch her looking and she smiles, softer than the situation warrants. 

"Strucker, you have a choice here." She begins, turning back around. "You can give me information and die quickly, or hold out on me and die painfully. I'm good at both. I'm better at the second, though." 

Strucker's face is carefully schooled into blankness, an expression she knows well, he's hiding something significant from her and knows he's close to giving away the game. He just needs a push in the right direction. 

Never say the Jackal never warned her victims…

The sound of a knife sawing through bone is distinct. The serrated edge slides easily through the meat of his index finger and then skips over the phalangeal bone a moment while she readjusts and presses harder to compensate for the change in density. Blood pulses out of the wound too quickly, so she takes her lighter and heats up the end of the knife just enough to burn it shut.

She can't hear his screaming for the blood pounding in her ears, hot and singing to her. " _ Just a little more" _ , she tells herself,"  _ just a bit more and you can let go" _ .

A strange sensation floods her nerves, then, a cold tingling that runs up the back of her spine and makes her vision flash scarlett for a moment. Her mind suddenly seems louder, like her thoughts are being spoken aloud, and she becomes distinctly aware of a presence behind her before the awareness vanishes and her vision swims.

* * *

 

The table beneath her is so, so cold. She knows she's shivering, shaking against the restraints until the buckles scratch her skin, but she can't seem to stop. Even her bones feel cold, somehow, even the bones that she knows aren't even there anymore.

Her leg, or what remains of it, is on a strange, round platform held up next to her by a quartet of golden chains. She understands why they refer to some of the more detailed mechanical drawings she's seen as having been "exploded". Her leg is shreds of meat clinging to shattered remains of bone. Red and white and black. A pair of hands is harvesting skin from it, she thinks, peeling flesh away where it hasn't been burnt and ripped apart.

Her other foot, the one that is still attached, seems even farther away, thinner and elongated. She's burned there too, in tangled wires of dark flesh and weeping wounds, but that's not what makes her taller. 

When she turns her head to the bright light above her, cast by the unforgiving surgical lamp wheeled over her head, she can see her reflection in the glass dome above the bulb.

Her face is narrower, gaunt, her eyes red-rimmed and sunken are ringed by bloody sclera and pupils like pin pricks. She looks like…

Like a ghost.

A  _ Wraith _ .

She doesn't scream. She's beyond screaming. She just stares in horror at the animal that stares back.

* * *

 

Barnes sees the change out of the corner of his eye. His attention focused on the cryogenic chamber resting innocuously against one of the stone walls, connected to a network of cables that spread out around it like a spiderweb. An older model. Nineties, he thinks, maybe earlier. He'd be able to tell exactly when he'd been put inside if he checked the logs… but…

Strucker's screaming stops abruptly, replaced by a soft whimper, but Jack doesn't continue her interrogation. She's silent as the grave and when he glances over he catches a flash of auburn going through one of the doors and Jack's form swaying slightly in place, looking down at her bloodied hands.

The next several seconds happen too quickly for Barnes to react. He hears a noise, a rattling growl that he can feel in his bones, and Jack's hand shoots forward to wrap around Strucker's neck, her fingers seeming to extend into brutal knives as they pierce the rigid pipe of his throat with a sickening pop. Blood gargles out of Strucker's mouth as he tries to scream again, and Jack leaps onto him with her other fingers scraping down his chest, eviscerating him even as her teeth close around his shoulder and rip.

The growling sound grows deeper, a thrumming bass that he feels more than he hears. She seems to expand with it, body growing long and narrow. He realizes finally, after a dumbstruck thirty seconds, that she  _ is _ changing.

Balanced on her toes, her boots break around the changed dimensions of her feet, long and narrow and looking more like something belonging to some quadruped. Her prosthetic, engineered to compensate for her movement, extends with her, metal sections clicking apart in a mechanical stretch that matches the organic one on her other side. The kevlar around her midsection snaps under tensile stress, revealing the pronounced rivets of her spine and the hollow arch of her belly. Her muscles seem to stand out in corded ropes beneath her skin. 

Jack had told him, once and only once, about the woman from Caine's lab. Gaunt and stretched with no mind left. She had assumed it had been malnutrition and stress that had caused the physical side of the transformation. 

Not so. She turns her bloodied face to him with eyes that gleam dangerously, pupils like slits and teeth bared in a horrific purr that causes Strucker's blood to ooze between them and spill over her lip. 

He finally forces himself to move at the same time she pounces, rolling under her and jumping into a run toward the door, pursued by the hissing gargle of frustration as she re-orients and bounds after him. 

He needs a way to pacify her. Something, anything that could take her down without killing her directly because now that he's faced with it he  _ can't _ . She's still inside, she has to be, and he can't kill her. 

He lied. God help him. He lied to her.

"Second enhanced on the fourth floor!" Steve says through the com.

Barnes realizes with a start that he's not alone. He has Steve again. Steve who saved him twice from becoming a monster. 

Barnes makes it to the door and wrenches it open, stepping through and bracing it shut just as the slam of a body on the other side splits the wood with a dangerous crack. 

"I have a way, way bigger problem in the basement."

"Another enhanced?"

The body slams against the door again and claws like bloodied hooks rip away a piece from the top of the door. 

"Steve." He says "It's Jack."

There's a long moment where Barnes hears nothing but the vicious scraping and growling on the opposite side of the door, the vibrating tone making his gut twist with real, primal, fear. 

Until finally: "I'm coming. Hold on Buck."

* * *

 

 

A flash of red throws Steve down the stone stairs without warning, barely giving him enough time to brace against the impact, and the culprit seems to almost float backwards through a doorway before it slams shut in front of them.

"Second enhanced" He wheezes, sitting back up, "on the fourth floor."

There's a smattering of confirmations from most of the team, and then Bucky's voice, slightly strangled: "I have a way, way bigger problem in the basement."

_ No no no no no _ . 

He's so hopeful that it's just another one of Strucker's experiments, but the twist in his gut and Bucky's strained pronouncement dashes it almost immediately. "It's Jack." Can only mean one thing. She's gone feral, and this time she's beyond help. 

He makes his way as fast as he can down flights of stone steps. He hits the first floor at a run, follows the hallway to the next staircase and can hear the inhuman sounds of hissing and growling echoing through the broken doorway. Its low and eerie and makes him clutch his shield closer as he descends into the dark basement with only the shuddering light of the door ahead to guide him.

Bucky has his back braced against the remains of a wood and iron door holding it closed while an emaciated hand claws at the opening, scraping against slivered wood and nearly catching Bucky's shoulder. The sound is deafening here, loud enough to feel it echo through his body like a tolling bell, and it takes him a second to steel himself and run to the door, pushing his shield up against the ragged opening and holding his weight against the thrashing on the other side.

"About time." Bucky huffs, jolting forward a little when the door gets rammed from behind. 

"Couldn't let you two go dancing alone again, could I?" A high pitched screech echoes from within the room and they both flinch. "What happened?"

"I think one of the enhanced got to her. She was working on Strucker and seemed in control, so I started casing the rest of the lab. Next thing I knew she was going feral, but… not the same way she usually does. She changed, Steve, physically."

"The scepter's in there, did the enhanced take it?"

"No, it was still in its weird box last I checked." Bucky's eyes keep looking up at the tiny gaps left in the door, and Steve follows his gaze to the grasping claws, inky black and razor sharp, as they try to shred their way through with a violent single mindedness. 

"Any ideas?"

"No, punk, that's why I called you!" 

The door lurches, and claws push past the gap where the shield slips out of place, tearing at Bucky's shoulder where its edged too close. They sink deep, like elongated knives, and yank him up by the bicep, trying to pull him through the door. Bucky screams, blood pouring down his arm and across his chest as he uses the metal of his other hand to pry the talons loose. Steve bashes his shield against the bony wrist and earns an angry screech in response, the claws retreating back through the door for the moment.

Bucky clutches his bleeding shoulder, putting pressure on the wound and breathing hard. 

"You need an evac." Steve says. 

"Not until I know she's safe." Bucky grinds out. "End of the line, remember?"

Steve remembers. He also remembers other promises, and the look on Edith's face when she told them she was dying. No fear, just anger and resignation enough to make his heart break a little bit. She had been staring down the barrel of this inevitability for months.

He didn't think he could handle it, and she was right, but…

For Edith? He can at least try to stare it down with her. Here and now.

"You have to keep pressure on that wound. You can't fight right now." 

"The hell I can't!" 

Steve bites his tongue, the urge to order Bucky to leave is there, but he knows it won't do him any good. So he bargains instead. "Stay here. Keep pressure on your arm, and if things get hairy I promise I'll get out and we'll try and fix this together." 

Bucky shoots a glare at him, one that reminds him painfully of Edie's same look of disapproval reserved for the times she's especially pissed off, all fixed gaze and drawn brows with her mouth pressed into a thin, thin line. 

He used to kiss the expression off her face, pull her hair loose from its habitual braid and run his fingers through the silky strands until she smiled again and called him an idiot. He's not disappointed that it works on Bucky as well. He presses his lips to the seam of the other man's mouth, gentle and careful, until Bucky huffs against him with a sigh, returning the kiss with a frustrated growl. "Don't get dead."

Steve presses his forehead to Bucky's, the hand not bracing his shield cupping the back of his neck, thumb brushing over the other man's pulse. "I'll do my best."

The lab is a mess, broken furniture and blood everywhere. The scepter is still in its container, knocked to the ground and glowing electric blue off to the side of the room. The titanic chitauri worm suspended from the ceiling is the only intact thing within his sight line, along with the sinewy form hunched over something at the far end of the room, bronze muscles working as the sickening crunch of something fleshy undercuts the bass of what he thinks might be a kind of purring. 

Amber skin, speckled and lined with old scar tissue, jet black hair, and the charcoal shape of her left leg are the only recognizable features that remain. The rest is warped into a long, whiplike, body. The contours of her ribs and spine protrude beneath the thin barrier of her flesh, looking like an extension of her armor, or what remains of it. The breastplate has cracked and fallen to the ground barely meter from him, leaving her in torn kevlar and the loose shapes of her bracers and greaves. 

"Edie."

It comes out as barely a whisper, but the creature turns its head. An elongated ear, wide, sunken eyes, and blood soaked jaw come into view, teeth baring sharply around the remains of something that may have once been an arm, dropping it to the ground like a discarded toy.

She stalks toward him, moving on all fours like an enormous cat. Head lowered and growling that low, rumbling, noise that makes his heart beat faster in his chest. 

"Edie, it's me. Please." 

She had been half-a-head shorter than him, tall enough to reach the top cup cupboards at home if she stood on the tips of her toes, to kiss him if she did the same, now she was taller than him by at least two feet, staring down at him with red-haloed eyes that turn the coffee colour of her irises to a burning amber. 

His heart hammers under his ribs, looking up at her and watching her examine him like a predator examines its prey. There's a cold, unsympathetic, intelligence behind those eyes, the same look she'd had in Caine's lab all those months ago. 

He puts the shield on the ground between them, gingerly, maintaining eye contact, and holds his palms out to the sides when he rises again. There's a growling sniff, flattened nostrils flaring as they take in the air around him, claws clicking against the stone tiles as she takes several steps forward.

He doesn't look away, just holds his hand out toward her. She glances at the shield on the ground, pushing it across the floor with one spidery hand, and lowers her head to sniff at his palm with a low rattling breath. 

"It's okay." He tries "It's me, sweetheart."

Something heavy falls over across the room, and Steve looks away for barely a second before steak knife teeth clamp down on his arm and pierce skin and muscle, cracking bone. Pain nearly blinds him, burning and stinging as something acidic eats away at his suit and the exposed flesh. The smell is terrifying, like rotting bodies and sulphur, and he tries to pull away only to feel the teeth sink deeper and shred down his forearm. 

A door slams open, and he hears the whine of a repulsor, before a bright flash of neon energy knocks Edith aside. 

The sound she makes, a high pitched scream that reverberates through the lab, knocks Steve back, shaking the room enough to make the chitauri carcass above them squeak against its supports. Tony fires another shot, and Steve manages to get his bearings in time to see Edith leap out of the way, and then reach up and slam Tony out of the air with her claws.

"Uh, Cap?!" He shouts, and she bashes him against the stone floor again, teeth coming down to scrape ineffectually against Tony's armor. Steve has no choice but to leap over to his shield and fling it with the hand that's not currently burning horribly. It hits her in the ribs, staggering her enough that Tony can fire his chest repulsor and knock her onto her back, hissing. 

Steve spares half a second to glance at the arm, turning green and black and weeping like a gangrenous limb. Tony's suit seems to have lost paint and corroded where she's landed bites.

"Don't let her bite you!" He shouts, and Tony gives him a derisive "No Shit!" As he fires off another beam, scorching her exposed belly. 

Steve pulls she shield back, and uses it to deflect a reaching claw, forcing it back and pinning it to the ground her other hand reaches to grab him, but Tony throws something at the ground that holds it in place. She thrashes, chest heaving as she growls and spits and hisses and Steve thinks he might be sick from the smell of his dying flesh.  

She shrieks again, rattling the room around them, and he curls around her arm just to make sure he doesn't slip. Tony lands beside him, and stares at Edith through that expressionless mask. 

"So what are we gonna do?"

Steve thinks he sobs, isn't sure, cold dread bleeds into his limbs and he can't parse what his body is even doing at this point. His shaking hand reaches for the pistol at his side in slow motion, his heart twisting with more pain than even his arm. He wants to throw up. He wants to die. He wants to let her kill him so he doesn't have to do this horrible, heartbreaking, thing.

He looks at her face, empty and snarling as she tries to thrash herself free of her restraints. Her breathing rumbles through her like thunder, eyes wild and searching. Panic plain on her strange face. 

Those eyes fix on him, focused and afraid.

"I'm sorry, Edie. I'm so sorry." He says, and starts to squeeze the trigger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Expect the last chapter sometime this week ish... if I don't end up rewriting it again for the fifth time.


	10. Real World

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well folks, here we are. The end of Jackal. Thank you to everyone who Kudos'd, Bookmarked, and Commented. It really means a lot to my brittle ol' soul.

February, 2018

 

There's a cool, smooth texture beneath the fingers of her right hand, and it takes her several minutes before she can feel anything else. Another several hours before she can make sense of the muted sounds around her; soft speaking in a language she doesn't understand, and music turned down low. There's light flickering behind her eyelids but she can't be bothered to open them. 

She could sleep. She'd like to sleep. But something is keeping her awake, a gentle tugging on her consciousness that makes her scowl. Or, she tries to, but the muscles in her face feel too weak to complete the motion. 

She's known people with sleep paralysis; one of the stranger things that can happen to someone with PTSD. This isn't quite the same. She knows she isn't dreaming, and she's definitely  _ awake _ for the most part, she just feels like her body hasn't gotten the message yet. 

It takes what she thinks is another few hours for her to crack an eye open. Just one. It's almost not worth it when everything ends up looking like a colorful smudge against the lense of her vision. Can laser eye surgery be reversed? She blinks a few times and the images resolve themselves into a holographic mesh similar to what she's seen Tony use, and a pair of thin, dark, hands, festooned with a rainbow of bracelets, moving through the air above her head.

"Hngrnggh." She manages, her throat feels like she's been gargling antifreeze, and her attempt to ask what, exactly, the fuck is going on is foiled.

"You are very stubborn." Says a woman's voice somewhere near her head. There's an accent there that she can't quite place. "It's a good thing, too. You would be  _ very dead _ if you weren't." 

She had been looking to die, hadn't she? Had made plans to make it happen. Had asked someone to help her incase she couldn't do it herself. 

In hindsight that was a pretty shitty thing to do to somebody.

Christ, she'd done a lot of shitty things hadn't she? She can't even remember them all right now but there's a sinking feeling in her chest that feels an awful lot like regret. 

She hurt someone she didn't mean to. Several someones. She remembers feeling her control slipping away until she was nothing but a bundle of hyperactive sensory responses and hunger. She had been trapped, seemingly starving, and physically stretched like a rubber band. 

She needs to know what happened. She needs to know where she is. She tries to move but her limbs are atrophied and useless, and her voice is a crackling rasp that barely manages to make a sound let alone form words. She's afraid and confused and she thinks she might cry because she has no control over anything and isn't that exactly how things went to shit last time? 

A cool hand lays across her forehead, bracelets jangling, and there's a soft shushing noise. 

"You're safe here. I promise I'll explain everything soon." The woman says "But I can't fix you if you don't relax." 

She swallows around the broken sound that wants to leave her throat. Feels like she's swallowing around a shard of glass, but she manages to shift her focus to her too-fast breathing and try to slow it. Her lungs stutter, tripping over the first long exhale and evening out around the fourth or fifth. 

In and out. 

Like the tides. 

Inhale, pause, exhale. 

She had been good at that, once. 

* * *

 

March, 2018.

 

It was a miracle she had survived. Or so says Shuri, the woman who had brought her back to the land of the living. 

She had been given a dose of ketamine meant for the Hulk, and then been packed into a cryogenic  stasis pod engineered in the eighties to house Barnes between his assassinations. They kept her on ice for two years, with nobody able to solve the dual problems of curing her and waking her from cryosleep until…

Well, until everything went to shit again.

It's not difficult to do her research. There had been a schism between the Avengers, and Steve and Tony specifically. Sokovia had been mostly totalled after a rogue A.I. flipped on them and tried to turn the tiny nation into a meteor that would have made Tunguska look like a firecracker. The world had been, understandably, pissed off, and had sought to bring the Avengers and other organizations like them under the control of a governing body. Tony had agreed. Steve hadn't.

Privately, she thinks Tony wasn't wrong. The collateral damage was horrifying. She's proof of concept that enhanced people are dangerous if left unchecked. 

The accords, set to take place in Vienna, are attacked. And the finger is pointed at "The Winter Soldier".

Bucky -he feels like the name fits now and it's easy enough to make the change in her head- fills in the details while she sits on a couch in Shuri's lab, wrapped in a buttery soft blanket and clutching a cup of tea that's gone cold between her fingers.

He looks… good. There are still shadows under his eyes, but they're less intense, and he's put on some much needed weight. He'd done his own time in cryo since the clusterfuck that landed them both here, something to do with fixing the Soldier's trigger phrases so that nobody could use his brainwashing against him. 

She supposes not having to worry about random assholes hijacking your mind and making you attack your best friend is a good way to reduce stress.

She wishes it were that easy for her.

* * *

 

 

The home they share is small, but tidy, and facing a large, kidney-shaped lake with a small town on the other end.  

Bucky keeps his distance at first, and she's thankful; her thoughts are a disoriented mess and she feels, constantly, like she's drifting through a fog. She wakes up panicked, almost nightly, and keeps a hand mirror by her bedside to make sure her face is still hers. She files her nails down to smooth little stumps to keep them from reminding her of claws. 

Memories crawl back at a snail's pace. First vague impressions of smells and sounds and then the careening fear of losing control that sends her running for the bathroom so she can empty the contents of her stomach. 

The worst is when she steps outside and Bucky's shirtless torso, marred by a triplet of thick, curved, scars that travel from chest to shoulder, sends her back to the moment he got them. Meathooks for fingers, she remembers the feeling of warm blood drenching her hands and the howling hunger that had ripped through her body at the scent of him. 

She had wanted to eat him alive, warm and wriggling between the elongated shape of her jaws, the taste of blood and meat heavy on her tongue.

She faints, coming back around before he reaches her in the grass, his hand cradling her head delicately while she apologizes in a thin voice. Her skull throbs, and she feels cold and far away, distant as the moon.

* * *

 

Steve is notable by his absence. She hasn't heard from him since she woke, and when she mentions him Bucky gets this look on his face like he's trying to process something painful. Sometimes he even seems angry, eyes flashing dark and telling her he needs time.

She doesn't fight him on it, she's too tired, too heavy, to do anything but sit at the edge of the lake and wonder how deep it goes. She knows it's her own fault, no matter how many times Steve didn't listen to her warnings, she knew she was dangerous to be around even before Hydra drowned her in venom.  

If he's finally smartened the fuck up and let her go, she can't blame him. She just wishes he and Bucky had stuck together.

Their relationship, her's and Bucky's, had always been blunt, and lacking in the bullshit that came with too many words and not enough action. When he lets her stew in her confusion though, she finds she resents him for it. He's trying to bury something and hide it from her and she can smell it like a rotting corpse in their forced domesticity. 

She thinks it might not be so tense in their cabin if they were fucking. Or kissing, at least, but she has too much baggage and her libido is basically non-existent while her brain spins it's depressing wheels, round and round without ever moving a goddamned inch. 

Bucky settles for too-brief hugs and the gentle press of his lips on her hair and she feels as guilty about that as anything else in her fucked up life. What if she gets rough with him, falling into the old pattern they'd established? If she draws blood she might find out just how much of that need for violence was her and not the monster.

And even then…

Shuri tells her not long after she comes out of stasis that she still has all the markers of the Meta Gene. She could, if she consciously tried, still transform into something similar to the creature she'd been. 

But if she can manage it consciously, she reasons, her stupid brain could probably figure out a way to do it unconsciously as well. 

No wonder Steve is avoiding her. She's a fucking basket case. A dangerous, sad, basket case. 

April comes with driving rain and vicious storms that send the humidity skyrocketing with an oppressiveness that rivals her mood. Bucky retreats indoors, and she finds herself going on long walks around the lake that leave her sweaty and miserable for a reason that isn't related to her near-constant night terrors. 

The path turns to mud before her, and the rain comes in thick drops that soak through her clothes and leave her hair heavy and plastered to her head and shoulders in thick, black, tendrils. The mud sucks at her shoes so she abandons them, walking barefoot into the storm. Water rushes over her ankles and red dirt stains the soles of her feet and she continues onward, unphased by it all.

She was afraid of storms as a kid, and of deep water, and death.

It's funny how things change. 

She steps into the churning water and let's it pull her in further, feels it suck her into the lake and drag her deeper and deeper until the water closes over her and she's floating. Staring up at the choppy kaleidoscope of grey and white and green, and watching the lightning flash spectacularly while the roar of raindrops muffles the rolling thunder into white noise.

Despite the frenzy of motion around her, she finds a stillness. The water around her is cool against her skin, and the weeds creeping up from the darkness below seem to caress her legs and feet, even if the prosthetic only just registers the barest of touches. She feels cradled in her solitude. Weightless, she could choose to sink to the bottom, or swim up past the top of the waves. 

She closes her eyes, and let's the air in her lungs bubble out from her lips, leaving the constraints of her slowly cramping lungs, letting her body drift.

* * *

 

Bucky watches the red sky from where he's leaning against the house, covered by the awning on the narrow porch. The rain stopped an hour ago, the storm blowing itself out even earlier, and the clouds seem to have parted just enough to let the last rays of sunshine filter through.

He'd spent the day inside, alternately reading and doing bodyweight exercises in an attempt to clamp down on his nervous energy. 

He hates being indoors for too long. Hates inactivity. It gives his brain room to wander into dark places and set up shop and he's had enough of that to last him several lifetimes at this point.

Jack's the same, he thinks, spending her waking hours on long hikes into the Wakandan wilderness that take her away from him from dawn until well after dark. He worries, but only because he knows that her own thoughts aren't as easily distracted by calisthenics and cheesy action novels. When they talk she always has this distant look in her eyes, like she's not really there with him, and he wonders sometimes if Steve could fix it.

Steve who shot her point-blank, three times. 

Bucky's heart twists uncomfortably. Steve had, for the first time in his entire stubborn, defiant, idiot, life, decided to follow orders. Jack had said "Kill me if I lose control" and Steve had listened. 

Nevermind that Bucky was supposed to be the one to do it.

Nevermind that they hadn't bothered to even try to cure her. 

Steve had pulled the trigger three times and the bullets had lodged themselves between her eyes in a near perfect triangle.

The fact that all it did was disorient her for a minute was besides the point. Steve had shot her, and Bucky had begged him to stop. 

Not because he wanted to spare Steve, like Jack had said. She had assumed it would be easier for Bucky, that he didn't feel the same way about her, and maybe she was right on some level. Bucky hadn't known how he felt until the second he watched the first bullet hit her and was positive she was dead. 

His entire body had gone cold, worse than coming out of cryo, and everything seemed to move in slow motion. Bucky had felt himself scream then, but his ears were ringing and he couldn't hear his own voice. Two more bullets hit the same spot, and blood had splattered thickly outward around her face in a halo of red, and she had scrambled backwards with her claws reaching for the wound, screeching.

She should have gone silent as soon as the first bullet hit. Should have fallen to the ground and gone still. Instead she had made strange noises and thrashed against the stone floor. 

It was a blessing and a curse that she remembered none of it. Jack had woken up with gaps in her memory that left her asking questions he didn't know how to answer without hurting her. 

For every "Where's Steve" and "Why did you leave him?" There's an ice pick being driven through his heart. He had wanted it to work out, the three of them, and even after Bucky ran from that lab Steve had come back to save him from the mess that was the Sokovia Accords, earning himself a multinational criminal status I'm the process. 

They hadn't spoken about any of it. Steve had managed to look guilty, and said that Jack was still in cryo, but nothing else.

Bucky had been quietly furious all the way up until he went back into stasis himself. His pod lined up next to Jack's, the window wide enough that he was able to turn his head and see her sleeping face as he went under.

He sees her at a distance now, walking up the muddy road from the east end of the lake. Her clothes and hair clinging to her body, soaked through. She seems completely unbothered by it, her pace even, the only surprising thing about her being that she's returning before dark.

"You're back early!" He calls across the field.

She waves a hand, sunlight catching the water droplets on her skin and making her shimmer. 

She approaches him, dress dripping trails of water down her calves and bare feet leaving wet prints against the dirt. 

It catches him off guard when she pulls him down to slide her mouth over his own, lips warm and tasting like rain and salt. 

His arm wraps around her waist, heedless of the damp cotton that soaks through the front of his shirt when he pulls her close, feeling the thin shape of her hands tangle in his hair, the flutter of her heartbeat beneath his hand. 

It's slow, exploratory, and far more gentle than they've ever had with one another. No teeth or pulled hair or rough hunger between them. She lingers against him before parting, a warm blush painting the space across her cheekbones. 

"Gonna explain why your shoes are missing?" Is the only sentence his brain seems to be able to form, but she smiles softly and leans her forehead against his shoulder.

"Mud." She says. "Was easier to just leave em."

"And the seaweed stuck to your ass?" His hand pulls away from the shallow curve of her hip with a string of green leaves as evidence. 

"I went swimming?" 

"Uh huh." He sighs against her hair. He doesn't want to push this sudden flash of a good mood away with too much needling. Jack's spent enough time picking herself apart.

She kisses his shoulder softly, squeezing her arms around him. "When you're ready, I think we need to talk about what happened." She murmurs, just loud enough that she can be sure he can hear her.

Bucky isn't sure he knows how to talk about this. His hurt boiling too close to the surface and his concern for her state of mind still not quite allayed. He cups the back of her head gently, fingers burying themselves in wet strands of thick hair that cling to his skin.

For Jack, he decides, he can try.

* * *

 

May, 2018

 

"I dunno, Sarge, it's a bit flashy." She teases, and he sighs long and loud in response.

"You're so hard to please." The sound of metal clinking against metal, and an electric click click click of something being moved into place.

"You like it." A slow smile in that voice.

Steve can hear them from outside the lab, leaning against one of the curved walls and listening to the easy back and forth and quiet low tempo music coming from within. 

Bucky sounds different, more present, a bit more like the man he was in the forties. 

Edith sounds less manic than she did before… everything. 

Part of him had hoped they would be waiting for him when the Quinjet landed. He had scanned the gathered crowd for dark hair and familiar faces but only recognized a handful of the Wakandan delegation accompanying T'challa to greet them. The king had quietly told him to check the lab on floor twelve, taking the rest of the assembled team to their rooms to prepare for what was about to fall on their heads.

"Okay that should do it." Edie hums. "Make a fist? Wiggle your fingers?"

"Yeah yeah, turn my head and cough, I get it." Bucky says and she laughs in response. "You did good."

There's a long, quiet, moment where Steve feels like he's eavesdropping on something extremely private despite the lack of sound. It makes him nervous, and he wonders if he should make himself known or…

"Mmphph! We have shit to do you dirty old man!" The soft  _ thwack _ of a gentle swat, skin on skin. 

"Can you blame a guy for trying?"

" _ Later _ . I have to go get into my armor and make sure Shuri didn't fuck with Bianca's calibrations again." 

The door swings the rest of the way open and Steve nearly jumps out of his skin when he's suddenly face to face with the woman he's been thinking about nonstop for the past two years.

She's much the same as he remembers, tanned a deeper amber than before and with her hair even longer. She's gained muscle, visible from her shirts loose fit and lack of sleeves, and looks much healthier than the last time he saw her. Her eyes are still that gorgeous mahogany brown that he fell in love with, her mouth still an expressive line.

She stares at him, a hand on the door still, eyes flicking over him, brows knitting with a kind of confused disbelief.

"Edie I-"

"You grew a beard."

It startles a laugh out of him, not quite relieved, but the fact that she hasn't tried to punch him yet is probably a good sign. 

He spots Bucky through the open door, sitting on an exam table with his shirt off, the black and gold sheen of a new arm flexing and testing it's range of movement. He pauses mid-motion to look over at Steve.

It's not a punch, but it feels like one. A look of angry disappointment flashes across Bucky's face, worse than the looks he'd given Steve after any of his ill advised fistfights back before the serum.

Edith's neck twists as she glances back at Bucky, then to Steve. She bites her lip and huffs a soft sigh through her nose. 

"I have to go handle some stuff?" She says, sounding unsure, "You two need to talk. So…"

Steve doesn't know what to do. He reaches over and squeezes her shoulder softly, feeling the heat of her skin through the thin fabric draped over her shoulders. Close enough to touch, she still feels half a world away from him when she slips past and walks quickly down the curved hallway and out of sight.

The door creaks as it inches closed and Steve finds he has to take a deep breath before he reaches for it, stepping through and clicking it shut to keep any other eavesdroppers at bay. Bucky's hopped down from the exam table and is in the process of putting his shirt back on, covering still-pale skin and long healed scars. 

"What are you doing here?"

Steve opens his mouth to say something about Thanos and Vision and infinity stones but realizes at the first syllable that that's not at all what Bucky means.

"We could die. I wanted to see both of you." He tries, and gets no response. Bucky's always been able to hold a grudge like nobody's business, and he seems to ignore Steve in favour of packing up a roll of tools scattered across a nearby cart. 

"Buck-"

"She blames herself for everything that happened in Strucker's lab." He says before Steve can finish. "She has nightmares. Wakes up and goes swimming in the middle of the night. I don't know how to help her process everything she's been through. I keep thinking 'Steve could fix this' and it makes me mad as hell because you  _ shot _ her." 

Like he needs any reminder. Steve can recall with photographic detail the sensation of pulling the trigger on his rarely used sidearm, the trajectory of the first bullet clear in his mind as it slammed into the plane of her forehead. Her eyelids had stuttered closed and then snapped back open, and he had fired two more times, feeling the metallic heat on the back of his hand. His other arm had been a mass of agony at his side, smelling like burning meat and sulphur, but it had paled in comparison to the pain in his chest and head when he had watched her neck snap back from the force of the third shot. He had held her words in his mind as he'd fired, a useless barrier between his guilt and what he had to do. 

" _ How about you, Steve, are you gonna put a bullet in my brain when I go nuclear and start hurting people I don't mean to _ ?”

And she had, hadn't she? She'd hurt Bucky, and Bucky was still standing at the door to Strucker's lab looking horrified, his jaw hanging open with the remnants of a scream. 

It was only moments later when he realised that Tony was preparing to fire another round of shots that Edith was only stunned from what should have been a fatal blow.

Presently, Steve stares at the curve of Bucky's shoulders, his hands flat against the cart he's been working on, his head bent forward. There's an exhaustion there that wasn't when Steve had first spotted him through the door. 

"It's not about us fixing her." He says and gets an irritated sigh in response. 

"That's not- You knew her before everything. You know how to be with Edith, I've only ever known Jack." He turns, and Steve can see the subtle differences between his old friend and the man before him now. Soft purple circles under his eyes and the minute difference in his posture, the deadly focus that's become a permanent fixture in his expression. Bucky is different too.

"She's changed." He says. "All of us have. She doesn't know the Bucky I grew up with, I don't know who you were when you two were off on your own, and you don't know the girl I met who took art classes and covered everything she owned with paint." Steve scratches his fingers through his beard, her room had been a complete dichotomy of hospital corner sheets and carefully organized possessions contrasted by the riot of acrylic colour splashed on seemingly every surface. Edith has never been a simple person to understand, and he's always loved that about her. "Point is, both of you are different people than you were when this started, so the best you can do is to just… meet each other halfway."

"Never thought I'd be coming to you for relationship advice." Bucky doesn't quite smile, it's more of a wry upturn at the corner of his mouth, but Steve decides he'll take what he can get.

"I don't know anything about relationships." He says "I just know that she cares about you and you obviously care about her."

Bucky snorts "She cares about you too, idiot." He tosses the roll of tools onto an open drawer and shoves his hands in his pockets. "And I'm still pissed off but I'm pretty sure I do too."

It's not quite the open arms he'd been hoping for, but it's better than the outright hostility he'd expected, and Steve feels a smile stretch across his face. 

"Calm down, you're still in the doghouse, punk."

* * *

 

She's fiddling with a three dimensional map of the battlefield when Steve walks in. She'd been faffing around with the damned thing for the past half-hour just to get her mind off the creeping anxiety of both the coming fight and seeing him again. She'd dropped him on Bucky like bad news and fucking ran, and now he was back, looking chastised… maybe. She can't really read the lower half of his face with the beard there.

She's not sure if she likes it.

"Hey." She says, like an idiot. 

He smiles gently. "Hi." He looks at the slowly rotating map, stepping closer "is this…?"

She clears her throat. "Us. Probably. We don't know exactly what our enemy forces look like so I had to plan for the worst. Shock troops, busters, cavalry, big ass guns…" 

She'd been stupidly thorough for someone given less than twenty four hours to hammer out a plan of attack. The Wakandan defenses took most of the load, with the allied army itself presenting an interesting solution to things like suppression and cavalry charges. 

Though they seemed to want to put their short range troops in front for some stupid reason. She'd grilled T'challa for nearly an hour on holding his heavy troops and goddamn rhinoceroses at the back of the army. She'd moved them to flanking positions with a legion of Dora Milaje spearwomen and border tribe shieldmen front and center. She'd also moved the Jabari in with the infantry to act as shock troops. 

"Sam and Rhodey can focus on strafing attacks and… Well I've got a handful of air support units keeping an eye on the barrier walls in circuits to stop anyone trying to crawl up our asses."

Steve isn't even looking at the map when she turns her attention up to him. He's staring at her with an intense look in his eyes that makes her flush. "What?"

"I missed you."

"I-" she doesn't know how to describe how she feels. How she's felt since she woke up. She's been alternating between nauseating anxiety and a determination to make up for her mistakes. "I was worried about you."

"Worried about me."

She gestures to his arm, the one she remembers sinking sharp teeth into and feeling skin and bone crack. She swallows the urge to be sick at the thought. "I remembered… a few weeks ago. Bucky told me it was scarred up pretty bad.

Steve gives a long exhale, steps closer and tugs up the sleeve of his suit to the elbow. 

Steve doesn't scar, the serum acts too quickly and his body heals any damage that would leave a mark before it can manage it. It's not that he doesn't get hurt, or bruise or bleed, his bones can even break if they're under enough stress, but the damage doesn't last long and his skin doesn't carry the evidence like a normal person's might. And yet...

His arm is pale pink and pockmarked from forearm to fingers, the skin looking like it had been burned and melted. It reminds her of images she's seen of lava flows, molten rock sliding sluggishly between channels of solid, some parts shallow and some deep. She doesn't realise she's gently tracing a particularly ragged furrow until his opposite hand covers her own.

"It doesn't hurt. They hit me with this regeneration tech and it repaired almost everything. The damage is only cosmetic." 

"There shouldn't be  _ any _ damage." Her eyes sting and she clamps down on the urge to cry. She's done enough of that and the idea of doing more makes her want to rip her own eyes out and throw them into a garbage disposal. "I'm so, so sorry, Steve. I never should have- I don't-" her jaw snaps shut and she makes a frustrated sound through her nose. She doesn't know what to do or what to say or how to say it and she has to swallow around the sharp lump of pain that seems to lodge itself all the way down into her chest, bleeding regret. 

" _ I fucked up _ " she wants to say " _ This is all my fault. I know why you stayed away _ ." But her mouth won't move.

Steve steps forward and wraps that arm around her waist, the other tucking against the base of her skull. She lets her head fall forward and press against the rough material of his suit, exhaling roughly as he massages her scalp with the pads of his fingers. 

"I can still go feral." She says, "I can still hurt you." 

"So can most of the people I work with." 

"Not like… not like this." She indicates his arm with a halfhearted lift of her hand. "I don't want to hurt either of you. I- I love you." She feels his grip tighten around her, constricting her in a way that feels still and safe. He used to hold her like this after her nightmares, grounding her back within the reality of her body. Now she knows her body isn't the solid and fixed thing she believed and wonders If maybe if they just stayed like this he could squeeze all of her pieces together until they were permanent again.

"You said something about getting your armor and gun?" He mumbles against the crown of her head.

She sighs. "I did. I got distracted."

"Bucky said you've been distracted a lot lately."

Of course they talked about that. Twenty minutes and they probably barely spoke about anything that mattered between them. They probably talked about her like doctors discussing a patient. 

"Processing things, I guess." She says, and he doesn't let go, just squeezes her closer. "He was pretty mad at you."

"I was expecting him to cold clock me in that lab, to be honest."

She huffs a laugh, "He loves your pretty face too much to wreck it, even with the beard in the way."

"Do you hate it?" He sighs and she looks up, studying his face, the slope of his nose and the bright blue of his eyes. The beard is… different, soft when she touches it, and masking the angle of his jawline.

She kisses him, and it's not nearly as uncomfortable as day-old stubble, doesn't make him any less enthusiastic in his thorough exploration of her mouth, or any less vocal about his enjoyment. His lips are still soft and hungry against he own, and he still tastes like spearmint toothpaste under the tang of coffee. 

"I don't hate it." She says after a few moments, and he grins, pressing their foreheads together.

"Good." He says.

She snorts. "Good."

* * *

 

Standing with the men she loves on either side of her, facing the coming deluge of an army she's never seen, she feels a strange sense of calm.

Here, on the precipice of a battle to do no less than save the world, Edith and Jack find a kind of balance. Edith's tactical skill and creative strategies slot into place against Jack's easy savagery, and combined with Steve and Bucky she's able to find a kind of peace. The calm place underwater where she's able to let her awareness find a cool, emotionally muted rhythm is here too, gazing out at the waving grass and teeming mass of alien soldiers massacring themselves at the barrier.

She is Edith. She is The Jackal.

And she is herself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have plans for a series of one shots with no particular order. Possibly an endgame fix it? We'll see how the plot bunnies feel.
> 
> In the meanwhile I'm currently working on some Dragon Age fic and even a wierd little Stardew Valley mess. 
> 
> I take prompts/requests/commissions as well so if you're into that sort of thing shoot me a message!
> 
> Thanks for reading this little self-indulgent shmoop fest.


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